


Magnetic Fields - A Diane Evans Account

by Beatrice_Sank



Category: The Secret History of Twin Peaks - Mark Frost, Twin Peaks
Genre: (I guess because the 90s sound so sexist in the series), Albert sassing everybody, Aura - Freeform, Being in love with a voice, Canon Compliant, Coop and co-op, Coop is too precious, Diane's such a bad ass, Distant love, Fix-It, Gordon is -you know- the Director, Identity Issues, Imagine you never got to see the events in TP but only could listen to Dale's tapes, Laura Dern's Diane btw, Meta, Minor LGBTQ+ themes, Multi, Mystery, Mysticism, Parallel Universes, Period-Typical Sexism, Power of images, Slow Burn, Sound travels through space and time, Tapes and mates, Working for the FBI, all your f words because it's Diane, am I right, and a lot of late 70's songs, or rather Philosophy, until it diverges
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-28
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-01-06 11:53:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 63,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12210771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beatrice_Sank/pseuds/Beatrice_Sank
Summary: "At some point in her life, she had to decide for herself, « in that indecipherable place between the eye make-up and the ridiculous flamboyant hair”, as Albert delicately puts it when she stares at him for more than three seconds (it's always great fun), at any rate in some secret and secluded part of her mind, one she but skims over most of the time, partly because that might result in dirtying the carpet and no one wants that, no one wants to see displays of crackled emotions coming from her of all people, especially not Albert, even if the look on his face might well be worth the ride, she had to decide, then, that Special Agent Dale Cooper was the stuff of legend."Or: Diane's story at the Bureau from the early years to Twin Peaks events. Follows canon up to mid-season 2, where it becomes a fix-it because we all need this and the second part of the season is kind of terrible anyway.Or: Diane Evans goes to Twin Peaks.





	1. The Agent Who Couldn't Exist

**Author's Note:**

> This is the story of the woman behind the tapes, and also an account of Coop's (and everybody else's) early years in the FBI, before the events of Twin Peaks. Then it will evolve into a Twin Peaks adventure (Lil will show us the way) and as a proper fix-it (and romance).
> 
> Not my first language, and unbeta-ed, so there might be some mistakes and weird stuff. 
> 
> Pardon the crazy tagging, I don't know how to behave.

At some point in her life, she had to decide for herself, « in that indecipherable place between the eye make-up and the ridiculous flamboyant hair”, as Albert delicately puts it when she stares at him for more than three seconds (it's always great fun), at any rate in some secret and secluded part of her mind, one she but skims over most of the time, partly because that might result in dirtying the carpet and no one wants that, no one wants to see displays of crackled emotions coming from her of all people, especially not Albert, even if the look on his face might well be worth the ride, she had to decide, then, that Special Agent Dale Cooper was the stuff of legend.

Because, in this age of rationality and bad-neighbor relations, he simply is not a concept that can stand examination. The man is, assuredly, but a myth, like the Yeti, the Tooth Fairy or FBI capacity for self-reliance. When he leaves for long missions, she sometimes lets herself caress the idea that he is nothing more than that heart-warming, honest voice on a recording machine, a disembodied entity no one has ever laid eyes on, and who haunts the magnetic tapes out of good-humored idleness, on a special frequency she is the only one to hear. So whenever a special agent risks a head into her office, demonstrating a certain want of self-preservation, to ask if she has “heard from Coop”, she only uses that ironic smile she has perfected over the years, as if they were asking about her last lunch with Santa Claus. After some time, it begins to feel as if she is the guardian of some curiosity museum, curator of a rare piece people come to see as a pilgrimage, to take pictures of and tell their grand-children about. It is no wonder then, that she grows very protective of D.B. Cooper, the agent that couldn't exist.

 

In all honesty it took but a glimpse. It was her first day of work, he had walked into the office and said “You must be the famous Diane. Special Agent Dale Cooper, freshly recruited too. Diane, I have a feeling we will do fantastic work together.” From then on, she was fucked.

 

 

It was Gordon who hired her. The interview was as unpredictable as one could have expected retrospectively getting to know Gordon, but she suspected he really had great fun letting his eccentricities rule for the sake of testing the nerves of poor respectable college graduates that would have to prove hermetic to the bizarre in general if they wanted to work for the Bureau. The silly old fool.

Of course Gordon never came with a warning sign for volume, but she had decided that the FBI might look for impassivity above all else, so she hadn't even flinched. That was probably a smart move, for she saw him absentmindedly tick something off only just after he said “HELLO, PLEASED TO MEET YOU”. One day, she really should ask him again about this interview, and probably about why he was the one recruiting the secretaries at that time, for, upon reflection, it didn't make much sense. He had scanned her resume, which was way too good for standard secretarial duties but much too elusive for anything else. Bar singing and dancing somehow didn't fit well on an official paper. She had a Bachelor in French and English but was way too bored, by the time she graduated, to continue studying. She knew she was sharp, but she preferred learning things her own way, preferably in a place where your obscure poetry book came with the adequate amount of booze, and without the condescending looks of spoiled WASPs who didn't even know the meaning of “scholarship”. Once, she broke one of them's nose with a side blow: an accident, it was her plastic bracelet that did the trick. Glorious as it was, she carefully edited it out of her resume; she still was a bit naive then, wasn't sure how much they investigated each new employee. Gordon probably was delighted:

“I APPRECIATE THE FRENCH, BUT WHERE DID YOU LEARN SPANISH THEN? IT NEVER WAS MENTIONED IN YOUR CURRICULUM”

She had gauged him for a second before answering flatly:

“El Paso's karaokes.”

That was entirely true. They used to call her “the learned tap-dancer”.

To his credit, he showed no reaction whatsoever.

“EVER BEEN TO JUAREZ?”

“I have a friend who sang one too many songs there and disappeared.”

“I SEE.”

 

And he did seem to see something, whatever that was, to see something in her, as if she all made sense. Then he asked her to show him her hands, and how she typed. There was no trace of a writing machine in the room, but he looked dead serious and she felt it would have been weird to request one, so she mimed it, tapping her fingers on the table. Her hair were black at that time, so it meant her nails were orange and blue, her lips a bright pink: you had to have some structure in your looks, some secret plan of cohesion, and she always stuck to it, all of her life. Out of a sudden sense of pride, she air-typed some Philip Larkin's poem at the pace of James Chance's _Contort Yourself_. Orange blue orange blue orange blue orange: the tap-dancing had helped a great deal. Gordon had smiled a large smile, and then asked if she could walked out of the room pretending to be extremely angry, and then come back in immediately looking completely calm. That had won him a look of incredulity, but being ask to slam a door to get a job was like being offered a Martini in a convent; besides, this was no trial at all: she was born angry, and slamming doors always had a soothing effect on her. When she sat back, he told her:

“YOU MIGHT SEE SOME HIGHLY DISTURBING THINGS IN THE COURSE OF THE JOB. DO YOU FEEL YOU ARE UP FOR IT?”

At that point she had heard enough to decide on the correct strategy, so she deadpanned:

“Well I was born in Alabama.”

This time it was complete bullshit, and he only had to drop his eyes to confirm that she was in fact born in San Francisco some 24 years ago; he laughed and told her that she was in.

He said she was to work for a newly recruited agent, a specimen of sorts and a very promising one. The job should be particularly interesting if she was up for it. He had a last long look at her, at her raised eyebrow and skeptical face, her unimpressed mask. “YES, he said, I GUESS THAT WOULD PROVIDE SOME BALANCE TO THE TEAM.” Fuck Gordon. After her first day she realized how bloody insulting that had been.

 

 

She was not inexperienced when she joined the Bureau. Which is why she was thoroughly unprepared for something like Dale Cooper. The first impression he made was that of a midinette's perception of the world came true. She should be more indulgent, she knows. But when he walked into the room, she just eyed him and he was so ridiculously good-looking that she almost laughed, telling him that it was not the sixties. God be praised she had sense enough to resist the urge, but one night, about a year later during some senior agent's departing party, she was well into her sixth daiquiri, and he was resting his head on his hand, like he does, catching the light just the right way, so that she suddenly felt too much benevolence toward the universe in general and blurted it out.

“You know, it's not the sixties anymore. You can drop the claim.”

He had looked at her utterly puzzled, and somehow it only made it worse. She worked hard on her hair and nails and eyes, because that was an interesting area of creativity, she found, and because it allowed her some extra confidence in this masculine setting, fuck everyone's opinion. But he, he looked like he was born in a pit of brilliantine somewhere in Marlon Brando's family tree. There seemed to be no effort in it, or rather to be the only look he ever thought he could have and had not considered options. The black suit did nothing specific for her, she hade made sure to check before applying to the Bureau because it would have been hell otherwise, but on him it looked different. He could be in his pajamas (and she knew what those were like, this was one of the prerogatives of the job) and still looked clad into something tailored. Fuck that pristine idiot. She had not explained herself, only waved an annoyed hand in front of his face and torso, and took off to the sound of Donna Summer. She might be a social embarrassment but she sure knew how to dance.

 

Albert told her the day after that, while he was nursing a rather spectacular hangover, that Coop had just watched her go and stood still like an idiot for a quarter of an hour, the same look of incomprehension stuck on his face.

 

But it wasn't only his looks. Looks she could manage, she was used to it. He had known her fair share of late comers beat poets and out-of-this-world musicians, too many to be impressed by a chiseled chin and jet black hair on a pale complexion. His collar bones were a much tougher blow but she had to wait a good year and a half to discover them. It was his whole being, the way he talked to people, the way he took to look at her as if she were some small miracle he was infinitely grateful for.

Sure, she can handle a report and she types without missing a bit, she soon learns how things work in the Bureau and finds shortcuts, allies and numerous foes, she has an excellent memory and a good eye, and she's overqualified when it comes to make unwanted intruders run off at the speed of light. But for God's sake, job's not that hard, and the extras, she does it because it interests her. Although given how dumb most agents sound to her, she shouldn't be surprised to be regarded as some local Eleanor Roosevelt. It's frat boys and their toys all over again. But not Coop. He should have “Boy Scout” tattooed in his forehead, she tells him one day, and from then on she sometimes salutes him the scout way when he asks her for something.

 

She expected him to be some kind of self-possessed macho twat, like some of the agents are, or at least a young wolf with no interest whatsoever for office work and no regard for his secretary. Instead of that, after shaking her hand, he had placed a perfect, round, green apple on her desk, stating enthusiastically: “An apple a day makes good collaboration comes our way!”. She has to admit she had to drop the mask and look at him like he was a madman. But then he did something so very disarming that she just gave up instantly: he smiled at her, and gave her a slow thump-up. What could she do, really. So she blinked and said:

“What do you mean, “the famous Diane”? I was hired a week ago.”

The smile grew even larger.

“You did, but the boss was very loud in praising you. You have made quite an impression, I would say.”

She starred at him. She wanted very much to laugh her head off (Christ where had she ended up), but it was her first day, so she said:

“Very loud indeed.”

Cooper had no need for restrain, as opposed to her, and laughed heartily, as if she had passed the test.

“That's it. I like you!”

And that was it. She couldn't believe it, but for the next hours, she sat in front of her desk and chatted, explaining everything there was to know about him so that they could work peacefully together. He said he couldn't brief her on the Bureau yet, being new himself, but he swore to share everything he would learn in the following months, and hoped she would do the same. Obviously, he did know a great deal about FBI nonetheless, and that painted him as the kind of kid who would buy every magazine labeled “Noir” something, and scan public libraries for information and historical facts on crime investigation, quizzing his long-suffering parents. He probably played Junior Detective and took prints with flour and toothbrushes. And he was just mentioning he had asthma. Yes, she could perfectly picture it. At some point he said:

“I have been made aware that I have my share of peculiarities, and I might do things that you find unsettling. I am a man of habits, and that sometimes prevents me from acting what the young people of today call “modern”. Despite that flaw, I consider myself strictly open-minded. I have an aversion for turnips and violence, which might sound paradoxical for a federal agent, I'm very good with body language, which should not disturb you, and I need to eat _a lot_ to be functional. I tend to exercise at unexpected moments or to reflect on the mysteries of life out loud. I enjoy jazz music, good coffee, and the majestic beauty of nature. And if I ever sound like there's an elephant sitting on my chest, you might want to make sure I still have a stock of VapoRub in my drawer.”

He looked at her expectantly, as if she was to validate him, and she vaguely wondered if she should take notes, or maybe ring the Intelligence Service to check if any lunatic had escaped federal prison lately. At least now she could consider herself briefed.

“And what about you, Diane?”

Ha. Of course. In other circumstances she would have been blatantly honest, like she'd been with Cole, but for some reason his gaze made her feel vulnerable, and she just had to show off to compensate.

“Given you're just out of training to be an _investigator_ , that would really be too easy to tell you everything, right?”

His eyes lit, like it was Christmas all over again, and he shook her hand once more with both hands out of sheer enthusiasm.

“Diane, you're absolutely right. What good am I, calling me a special agent, if I cannot figure my colleagues out. I'll keep you posted on what I find, then.”

By the end of the day, while sitting at his own desk in the next room, door left wide open, he had indeed figured out her age, where she was from, the fact that she had a younger sister she didn't get on with, that she was a good, no, an excellent dancer, and that she liked poetry. She has no idea where that last one came from, but she would have preferred him not to know. _Colleague_ , he said, not _secretary_. Not even _assistant_. When she bit into her apple for lunch, it was so good she was forced to grin, and have a look a him through the window panel that separate their rooms. He smiled back. Fucked as hell.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By all means, have a look at Contort Yourself, to be a cool kid just like Diane : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCI24Lt9aNQ. It's a no-wave monument and it's pretty groovy. 
> 
> Also: Alabama, I regret nothing.  
> And: apples. Because why the hell not.
> 
> Larkin's poem is probably This Be The Verse, because I have an unoriginal mind.


	2. The Angriest Man in the World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Diane makes a friend, plays some mind games, and meets a very strange person indeed, not necessarily in this order. Contains: one very frustrated agent Cooper, one OC I already love too much (loving your own OC, the capital sin), loads and loads of banter and... Albert Fucking Rosenfield, ladies and gentlemen!

 

 

The next person she got to meet at the Bureau was Pam, and hell if it wasn't a reminder of all she wanted not to be, in her job and in her life in general.

She was already so bloody frustrated by the thick testosterone atmosphere of the office and everyone acting, really acting, as if it indeed were the sixties. Social progress and feminism never hit the FBI, or so it seemed. Some days it felt way too ironic for her to be there, being exactly what everyone would have expected her to be, _just_ a secretary.

And Pam, she apparently had set her heart on being exactly that.

Her greatest fear, she surmised after some time, was to overstep her bounds of duty. The choice might have been imposed on her, for she looked everything the part she was playing, a petite blonde with a small round head and enormous blue eyes, and Diane knew how hard it could be to resist the urge that came from everywhere, to just play it as it should be, to surrender to your appearance and stop trying to be more than a two-dimensional character, a copy of some picture or other that the frat boys had seen in a magazine, or even in a family album, it didn't matter. The possibilities never were numerous enough, one way or the other, and fuck, it was the bloody seventies and they were supposed to be empowered; there was a severe time-line problem in the Bureau, and she wondered if there was something she could do about it. But you could almost see the dots around Pam. She was a sweet and fucking depressing person to meet.

But sweet, though.

She had knocked to the office in an annoyingly chipper way, with a _pattern_. Her pink face was utterly dejected for a second when she heard that Agent Cooper was in a meeting for now and would return in about an hour, but she recovered almost immediately when turning her attention to Diane as if she was a new treat. She could tell that Pam was intrigued by her looks: the colors, the bob cut, the flamenco shoes, the chequered dress – it didn't seem to match her idea of a newbie's secretary.

She was used to it, and this had in fact been a factor in her choice of job application, for she refused to have elderly twats handing her some ugly uniform with too short a skirt like it was some goddam privilege. She had been a waitress for years, very informally – and she had worn whatever caught her eye, until the bar began to make a profit and the owner turned into a sadistic nun. So she quit (she cannot remembers exactly, it's all a bit blurred because she probably wasn't very sober when this happened, but she thinks this might have been that one time when she left after writing a giant “FUCK” on the pool table, ruined her lipstick but boy was it worth it, and she hopes it gave ideas to inebriated customers).

 

Pam had been almost hypnotized by her nails when they shook hands, but she eventually recovered enough that she could introduce herself:

“I'm Pam, Agent Earle's secretary. He's away at the moment, but he's sent me to greet you both: he was the one who recommended Agent Cooper to the Bureau, you know. It's so exciting, a new agent _and_ a new secretary all at once! You can ask me anything, if you need, I've been here for a year already.”

She looked younger than her, so Diane wondered if they usually hired enthusiastic 18-years-olds instead of precocious cynics like herself. Pam was touring the office as if it was more fascinating that four vaguely beige walls and a lot of files piled up with more or less art. She wore a baby blue dress that seemed straight out of her mother's closet and heels that couldn't be comfortable to work with.

“There's not much to know, really. I mean, you have to organize of course, but people are nice around here, and we, we are the small cogs that keep the machinery going,” she laughed. “Oh, I have to warn you: the reports can be gruesome, I hope you're not too visual. I hadn't thought about that when I first typed one; you're not in the field, you don't actually get to see anything, it's something of a blind job. But yet... the first time I got a long case to transcribe, it involved children and I... well, this wasn't easy. These hands are made for typing, right?”

Another laugh, chiller this time.

“So you don't get to actually _do_ anything, but listening to the tapes, I just had to tell you, you have to be careful. So that it doesn't slow your work down, I mean. Because there are the facts and there's also the voice that tells them, like it's a dark fairy-tale sometimes... Oh, I don't want to frighten you, I'm sorry, and Agent Cooper is new so there's a chance they won't send him on the most demanding case before at least a year or two. I'm so lightheaded. What I meant is: take care of yourself. The clerks usually have lunch together in the meeting room on the 2 nd floor, you can join if you want, they'll be pleased. That's a lot of people of course, there's no obligation.”

There was something disarming about Pam, like her laugh might break if you pushed it too much. She usually disliked people you couldn't push: it was too much of a frustration. To her people were often like doors, sometimes she needed to slam them a bit, just a tiny bit, otherwise it was no fun, and why bother having doors at all. But that little piece about dark fairy-tales was intriguing. She hoped she would not turn neurasthenic after a year in the Service. She had clearly not seen everything, for she was stunned at how quick Pam's expression could change; it was like looking at two different pictures of a face, handed to you in rapid succession. Her eyes lighted up and she took conspirator's tones to ask:

“So...How do you find your boss?”

Sensing at the look she gave her the question might have sounded a bit loaded, she added hurriedly:

“I mean, it's the most important part of the job: you'll always be with him one way or another, it's best if you... I don't know, like him?”

“He's... not what I expected. In a good way, I guess,” she said, not wanting to elaborate on a subject that might blow up in her face later. Her interlocutor didn't seem too interested in her _psychological_ assessment of Agent Cooper anyway, as it was soon revealed.

“They say he's so handsome” Pam whispered excitedly.

Oh, for Christ's sake. She gave her a pointed look.

“I can neither confirm nor deny that information.”

That only added to Pam's delight.

“Oh I knew it! Jackie from Accounting spotted him on his way to the armory and she said he looked like a romantic hero, only a smartly-dressed one. You're so lucky. I've heard he outranked the officer who did his evaluation when he applied to the Bureau, can you imagine? They'll probably keep a good eye on him, I'd expect quick promotion if I were you.”

So the clever asthma kid also was the teacher's pet when it came to abs work and shooting silhouettes in the brain. His case kept getting curiouser and curiouser.

“Promotion from what, junior agent's secretary to senior agent's secretary? My, I wouldn't know what to wear,” she retorted with a dead voice, trying to slowly acclimate Pam to what she suspected might be her first contact with a modern, _blasé_ human being. She seemed impossible to reroute, though, and kept grilling her while simultaneously explaining some finer points of hierarchical structure and telling her where she could resupply her type-writer. Given the tenor of her questions, Diane ended up feeling that she thoroughly intended her to marry Agent Cooper before the end of the year. They also went through some of the impressive amount of confidentiality paperwork she had to fill to guaranty she wouldn't spill FBI's classified information over umbrella drinks in some local speakeasy.

“Doesn't it feel a bit dangerous and exciting, the idea that a guy might date you in order to seduce secrets out of you? It gives one unexpected importance. I admit I sometimes get a little paranoid,” exposed Pam merrily as if the statement wasn't so demeaning.

“I don't think I'll have to worry about that. Most of the guys I date don't even know my full name.”

That at least got her a reaction from her immaculate colleague, a glance that was part-awe and part-horror. She didn't mind posing as an adventuress, as long as it was in the positive sense of the term.

“Oh, by the way, mind Agent Barrow, I mean avoid elevators with him and that kind of things. He's a groper.”

She rolled her eyes long and hard, wondering if she could a) explain that if that ever happened, with anybody, she'd punch him like there's not tomorrow, or b) point to human resources and/or a police station to report harassment. All these start of the school year dilemmas were making her realize that her biggest problem in the professional (and probably personal, but jury was still out) field was that she hadn't the patience to behave in polite society. But today was not the day Pam would suffer from this flaw, she decided, because the girl really didn't deserved it, with her old-fashioned dress and porcelain smile. She thanked her and even promised to test the lunches if she managed to “tear herself away from the contemplation of the _ever so dashing Agent Cooper_ , come on now, the man isn't a model.”

 

***

 

 

On her second day of work, Agent Cooper greets her like the Messiah, and that just decides it for her; he shouldn't be the only one to run tests. Incredulity has regained ground over night, and she still cannot believe she works for the man who told her with a straight face he would love to go on a mission to Denver because they had the most wonderful spots for butterfly catching.

So after settling to her desk, she shows no sign of raising to go and make coffee. It's just something she needs: to make him wait, to frustrate him. She wants to see how he is when he wants something from her. To see his eyes. She watches all morning for him to have a reaction, and it really makes her feel like a cat on a hot tin-roof. There's something in it that verges on the sadistic, but he brought it on himself, it's day two and she needs to see the cracks in the golden facade as soon as possible, only to adapt and anticipate problems. To see how fast she can tear the myth apart, too. It's really unkind.

She monitors how he twits and turns on his chair, and she holds his gaze whenever he looks at her through the panel. As the morning progresses, his eyes get more and more longing. He takes to play with trinkets, with his new shining badge. He breathes deep breaths. After hours of this trial, she finally decides to get up from her chair, grabs the door frame of his office and asks:

“I'm going to Administrative Office, do you need anything Agent Cooper?”

He looks as a man who has been deprived of water for two days. He says in a strangled but gentle voice:

“Well, if it's not too far from your destination, could you bring us back a pot of coffee, Diane? That would be wonderful.”

She deserves the worst for doing this to him.

“Of course. Why don't you tell me how you like it, so that I can bring in a fresh pot first thing every morning?”

His relief is almost an obscene thing to watch.

“Black as a starless night, nothing but the real thing.”

She smiles and trots out.

After his first sip of a fuming cup he has sniffed with overjoyed anticipation, he declares, looking ecstatic:

“Perfection.”

She smiles and have a sip of her own cup. He's not wrong; once again, having been a waitress helps in many ways. But there is a problem with the way he delivers his praises: it makes her wanting more, and that is one thing she is unprepared for.

She has the time to finish typing the details of both their administrative sheets before she hears:

“Diane, I've figured out something new about you.”

She stretches her head to face him, curious.

“You need some time before really trusting someone.”

He's smiling a warm smile, with the lightest tint of sadness. She stays paralyzed.

 

The next day, there's a pot of coffee on his desk when he arrives. He thanks her profusely, and after a while smiles in his customary way and tells her:

“I'm not so bad”, and for the life of her she cannot tell if it's supposed to be a reassuring statement, a pleasant conclusion he has reached, or a question he's addressing her.

“Yes, I know,” she says, because she does now.

 

Friday comes and it's pie day at the cafeteria stand, an intel she got from promising Pam a chance meeting with Agent Cooper. She has no morality, to be sure, but she knew that already, and all the best to be treading one more step toward hell for the sake of pastries. She gets a large serving with an extra scoop of ice cream and sprints through the staircase holding on to her plate like a Frisbee champion. If anyone spots her, she may as well give up on any respect she had hoped winning in the Service, because right now she's the Pam of all Pams, the Secretary Who Overdid it.

She steps in the office. Agent Cooper is filling paperwork on his new service gun. She puts the plate next to him, carefully. He looks at it. He looks at it long and hard. And then at her, and suddenly she's not the one who's overdoing it, she never will be, because there is in this room someone who is much too intense for this pedestrian life. She doesn't think she's ever seen someone that happy. Hell, she doesn't think she's ever _been_ that happy. It's been a week, but she's still a bit afraid of him, and he doesn't exactly do his best to help. She says:

“I think you're very good at whatever it is that you do,” and smiles apologetically, for if she is to speak the truth, she owes him this. The strangest thing is that he seems to feel glorified by her opinion, as if she was qualified to judge his achievements as an FBI agent, or even as a person. Although she cannot exactly says he's wrong, because he has made his talents pretty obvious, as far as she is concerned, in the course of one week and the space of one office. She doesn't care if he takes bullet straight into black flat heads; he's good, he's obviously good, maybe too much, too much for this job and way too much for her.

 

After a month, he has discovered, among other things, which languages she speaks (“It's on my resume, Agent Cooper.” “Oh but that would have been cheating!”), that she hasn't got a favorite color (“yet,” he adds mischievously, as if favorite colors were like health insurances, something everybody was more or less supposed to acquire at some point, but she still isn't mature enough for it) and that she has set up his introduction to Pam.

“Look, I'm sorry, but you have to accept the fact that everyone is curious about you. Even if they see cadavers all day, these people seem to have nothing to live on, if you ask me.”

“Are you trying to get me married, Diane?” he had asked with his bantering smile, the one she was getting accustomed to. “That girl was looking at my non-existent left hand ring with obvious insistence.”

God, she had forgotten to tell Pam about her boss's annoying abilities. She discretely rolls her eyes, because she is not fully comfortable with insubordination yet, and says solemnly:

“You know, Agent Cooper, I'm not that much of a traditionalist.”

He has a small smirk that she wants to erase from his face one way or another when he answers:

“That one I had figured out already.”

 

When they reach their three months mark, she gets a three-months present: a small shoot of bamboo in a red pot.

“The first three months are supposed to be the hardest ones,” Agent Cooper offers as an explanation. “But once you're passed that, you can freely develop and bloom, much like that bamboo – well, not exactly “bloom” in its case, but bamboos are known for their impressive growing rate. I hope we will both thrive in this job!”

She doesn't really understand what he is trying to achieve: it looks like calculated team-building, but she can tells it's much more genuine than that. Can he really be that genuine, she asks herself for the hundredth time. The perpetual answer being “probably”, she only squints at him playfully:

“Are you the kind of man who buy gifts to his secretary saying it's a special kind of marriage? Because if so, I'm not taking the bait, and a new type-writer and coffee machine for our one year anniversary is out of the question. Think of what Pam would say.”

He laughs but then she has the privilege of witnessing a rare phenomenon: Special Agent Dale Cooper, blushing. She cannot wait for the year mark.

 

***

 

 

It takes her six month to actually meet Albert, and when it happens she is so grateful for him that she briefly considers buying a candle in that ridiculous chapel they have in the 1 st  basement – a place of nightmare with fake stained glasses, fake stone pillars and fake electric candles burning in the altar. The flowers, mysteriously, are always fresh though. You can go there when you need to be alone, if you have no faith in anything and no sense of taste whatsoever; she can only tick one of these items off, but sometimes that just has to do. Hardly anybody comes by, the whole thing being but a raised finger to whatever deities might be looking this way. She swears, on occasions, that it is Albert who has drawn the plans.

She never stays there too long, the lights somehow always wrong, a general dysfunction that grates on her nerves, but there are days when she just needs a de-Pam-ized lunchtime, and when she's too unnerved to even look at Cooper eating his apple and having him looking at her eating hers. This is an odd business of apples they have, when she thinks about it. But then she supposes they are a particularly healthy team, except when she's too hangovered to type without earplugs.

 

Six months in and she doesn't know her way to all the labs yet, because being new, Cooper never gets assigned blood cases that require analysis other than the usual prints and drugs. She's supposed to get the results of her first blood test ever, and she's as lost as a rat in one of their labyrinths. She hates herself for it, because she's everything if not efficient and right now her day seems very slack. The labs corridors all resemble each other, with neon lights too white and walls too gray, so long and monotonous you think you've walked for miles and miles after one or two, listening to the reverberation of your feet on the tiled floor, the only thing that can serve as a distraction. She crosses yet another corner, feeling as if she's following the course of some complex pipes, welded in an illogical way. Two miles of emptiness and uniformity later, she reaches her breaking point and randomly chooses a door on which she knocks before entering. It is very dark, except for a bright spot in the back where a man is performing some task in a lab coat over a white table. She has no desire to know more; the others clerks have warned her the lab team was weird, and for once she tends to believe them.

“Excuse me, I have lost my way”

The man raises his head with clear exasperation. His hair, already receding, is messy and though he's probably in his thirties, he looks oldish. Or maybe it's the light. He eyes her from toes to head and back, and says:

“Well that much is obvious. For Rio's carnival, it's second star to the right and straight on till morning. The circus left town only yesterday but if you jump in your dancing shoes you might have a chance to see Rico again.”

Oh dear, if this isn't love at first sight. She's so taken aback – six months in the company of sheep and she has lost a bit of her edge – she can only say:

“Fuck you!” as someone normal would say “How dare you?”

The man appears unfazed by her verbal display; and that's another thing she took care of editing out of her usual vocabulary, for people here overreact to verbal violence. All in all, she wonders what technique they use to calm themselves.

“I suppose all that creativity was spent on the looks, then. You can't have both Oscar Wilde and Bozo the Clown for that kind of money.”

This one's a keeper, that much is certain. She can barely contain her mirth. Now to find a witty comeback, because she has to show him she's not making any prisoner either.  
“My, my, do you insult your mother with that mouth? Is it one of those FBI experiments when they play with mismatching pieces of cadavers and then keep you locked up in the basement no matter how many times you cry you're not a monster but a real human being?”

She can tell his curiosity's picked. She has no clue as to who this man might be, maybe he just sits there waiting all day to meet someone who can match his insults and tango with him to an ironic tune. Stranger things have been witness in the FBI offices, as far as she is concerned. Since he's staying silent, looking at her pensively, she pushes her advantage:

“Where is your Rochester, Bertha?”

His face lights up suddenly and he says:

“Ha, I know who you are. You're the Alabama girl, aren't you? I should have remembered the description, it was vivid. Gordon couldn't get over it, he likes a joke more than the accounting department likes its spreadsheets. That's probably why he puts up with me at all. But that was a nice one, I grant you that.”

Sensing an opening, she walks toward him and offers her hand:

“Diane Evans, Agent Cooper's secretary. It's very inconvenient to meet you.”

The man ignores her, his attention back to his work:

“Yeah yeah, and all that jazz. Look, I appreciate the niceties, and I'm sorry such a colorful personality as yourself has lost her way in these seven corridors of hell, but as you could see if you're weren't wasting so much energy on your references, I'm hands deep into a corpse, and he isn't autopsying himself, as much as I'd love him to.”

To prove his point, he raises his bloody hands to her, and she suddenly realizes the white sheet covering the table is here for a reason. She shouldn't have come nearer, finding herself so close to a guy's insides makes her feel a little dizzy; but that's exactly what he expects, so she keeps a straight face and says:

“Seems to me that the guy can wait.”

“But his bacteria won't. So kindly hit the road before I'm tempted to strangle you with a lower intestine, for I have an intuition that might happen soon.”

She chooses to ignore the threat, because it's just occured to her that he probably shouldn't be performing an autopsy all by himself.

“Isn't it procedure that there should be two of you doing this? I mean obviously you had trouble getting your tools, look at the mess you made.”

And she's right: the room might me deem, but around the table the white light reveals bloody traces all around the metallic plate. The man gives her a pointed look.

“Let me guess, you were your teacher's favorite Muppet, right?”

He's a little embarrassed nonetheless, for it's never good to be caught hand in the corpse jar outside of the Bureau's regulation, or so she imagines.

“They wanted me to work with Stanley, the missing link between a dead fish and a street mime. The man's so thick it looks like he's thinking in slow-mo. I'm perfectly fine on my own, thank you for the concern.”

“Stanley, like Sam Stanley? The nerdy blond who looks like he might run away whenever you say “hello” to him?”

“That's the one. Although I cannot blame him in this particular case, except if he is colorblind.”

He tries to get hold of a pair of forceps, but before he can do anything she's holding it through a sterile compress.

“Look, let's make a deal: I'll pass you whatever you need, I imagine it doesn't require much skill, just ask away, and in exchange you'll send me on my way as soon as we're done. Is that fine by you? For I'm not leaving you side otherwise, and I've got a long list of puns including the word 'tool' that I fully intend to use.”

He seems reluctant but eventually asks:

“Will you dispose of the used sheets afterward?”

“No fucking way.”

He sighs:

“Alright, but only because you're such a pain in the ass. Don't get used to it. I'm not even sure your witty brain can stomach a stomach's content, if you see what I mean.”

She does; in fact she gets to see much more than she signed up for, handing him pliers, scalper, a plastic bag for the samples, clamps and finally some needle and thread to sew the body close. But it's not that hard to ignore the images that pop up in her mind, the idea that the people she knows contain such a colorful mix of substances too. The organ doesn't even look real, it might well be plastic. The gloves help, too, as if she wasn't touching anything real (well she keeps her hands to the tools anyway, but some of them come back soiled). Within a quarter of an hour, it's done, along with some barb-wired jokes to make do. She really likes the man, whoever he is. He's so different, and she wants to ask him if that's what the labs are doing to people, but refrain. She might save it for later.

“Okay so now we've explored a dead body together, am I entitled to your name?”

The bastard smiles and holds out a gloved, very bloody hand to her. Sighing, she shakes it nonetheless, trying not to let it glide on her own glove.

“Albert Rosenfield, although it's Doctor Rosenfield to you. You have a lot of guts, even more so now, go figure, so I'm gonna send you back where you'll be able to annoy the hell out of a fresh set of people, for I'm off to rest.”

“His Majesty's too generous.”

“Yeah, well I admit I didn't think you would do it properly, so it's on me, tragically. It pains me to say so, but you're probably a better catch than Stanley the monkey.”

“I'm blushing.”

He smiles largely, then gives her the direction to her office.

“So now you know where I dwell,” she says trying desperately to play it cool. “By all means do come and visit, the boss's a looker and we could use some of that salt you keep around.”

“Fat chance; although I have a disagreeable feeling that I will see you again soon.”

He rolls his eyes and adds:

“Thank you for all the fetching, I guess.”

She winks at him and departs. When she enters the office again, so late in her daily routine but with a spring in her step, Cooper looks at her and says with delight:

“Diane, you've made a new friend.”

She sits to her desk, a large, probably stupid grin on her face and blurts out:

“Cooper, I think I may have found my soulmate.”

His eyebrows shut out and he even blushes a bit; it's nice to see she still has the ability to surprise him from time to time.

“And may I ask who is the lucky gentleman?”

She could, theoretically, comment on “gentleman”, because that is presumption, but she lets it pass.

“Albert Rosenfield, the Angriest Man in the World.”

Cooper frowns:

“I don't think that I have met him. Is he an agent? You know, I wouldn't have taken you to be a believer in such an outdated concept as soulmates.”

And it's hilarious, because he seems all frustrated by the idea of her as a helpless romantic after all. As much as she would like seeing him furthermore disturbed, she has to clear up the misunderstanding. He can be so literal sometimes.

 

“Oh no, I didn't mean it like this. You see he's...” She realizes it will be hard to convey her exact impression of Albert Rosenfield without implying that her other co-workers, including him, decidedly lack some sense of humor. That would be a misinterpretation; but on the other hand, she cannot tell either that she's uncomfortable when people are being too nice to her. If by some small miracle he hasn't discovered yet how fucked-up she is, she's certainly not the one who's going to enlighten him. She has to give up: “It would be difficult to explain, I'm sorry. I think we will get on splendidly, that's all. I can't wait for you to meet him.”

And the amazing thing is, from this point, neither can Cooper. The name “Albert Rosenfield” takes for him a ring of mystery and reverence, an enigma he's dying to solve.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, that's a long one so I hope there's not too many mistakes. But on the other hand: a quick update. I know it's more like a character study right now, but I'm enjoying myself too much and I like to take my time. But if you get too frustrated with me, do yell in the comments. Next time, probably some thoughts on Windom Earle, the man who whispered dark tales in his tapes, and Philip Jeffries, the scary pop icon.
> 
> The insults? I live for writing them. I mean, Albert, Albert, Albert. He's just too lovable for his own sake.


	3. Recordings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here's a map of this chapter. In here you'll find:
> 
> Something meta.  
> Something funny and Albert-y.  
> Something magnetic and confusing.  
> Something blue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so I had this chapter, but it was 12,000 WORDS LONG. So it breaks my heart, but I had to split it, and you'll have the next part in about two or three days. It bothers me a tad because there was some sort of hidden unity in that chaotic series of episodes. No one wants to read 12,000 in a row, you will tell me, so here we are. Note that I can't keep a promise: Jeffries's in this chapter in a way but essentially in the next, and Earle will be in chapter 5, since I'm apparently unable to write short, cutting chapters.
> 
> Nevertheless, I want to underline that I'm introducing here some of the major themes. This chapter is called "Recordings", the next will be called "Rehearsals", and there is a good reason to that. I'll have a lot more to say on the following chapter, where things begin to get really peculiar and haunted. All I can tell now is that I intend to express my views on canon's obsession with doubles, mirrors, images and all things fake and parallel. So it's not only slow-burn, folks, hopefully we'll also have our share of mystical vertigo.

 

If time still means anything – a fact she sometimes doubts whenever she crosses the path of yet another agent whose haircut is vaguely reminiscent of Elvis Presley's least good phase – after a year or so in the Bureau a map of relations is beginning to trace itself more clearly in her mind, a brightly colored chart of friendships and enmities, with connections between dots much like a subway plan, beige stretches of indifference and pink areas of tension. One tends to overlook the trait, but she likes to keep her life organized, each and every aspect of it, to know where she stands and on whose table she's allowed to dance. Of course, when she's not, that doesn't necessarily means she won't, but all the same, you have to know the line to feel the transgression, and there is no pleasure in stepping on a foot you hadn't seen in the dark.

 

Marked in red, there are the people she dislikes more or less violently, although she was never known, especially in cocktail bars, for her sense of measure. The entirety of the Accounting Department, for no particular reason except that no one likes accountants. Some of the oldest secretaries, a gang of aging Republicans who joined in when you had to turn into a slavish saint to survive, and are judging every newly hired girl as if she was coming directly from the gutter. And some agents: the blatantly misogynistic ones like Barrow, the stupid ones and most of all the self-possessed ones, who are so convinced of their own smooth and hard-boiled importance that they take upon explaining the world to her whenever they have the chance. Chester Desmond might be the defining specimen for that category, or maybe it's because he pops in her office so often. It's like looking at a degenerated version of Cooper, or worse, the original version of Cooper, what the man could have been if he wasn't so… Cooper, so full of positive emotions and love for whatever life was providing him with. The idea of Cooper as a distortion of the normal, despicable FBI male agent is compelling, an experiment, a sparkling magic trick doing things to your eyes.

And marked in green, there are the people she likes: Martha from the cafeteria, who always slices her pies as if they were something precious and delicate, which they are to her; the beauty from the lobby, a blue-eyed guy with curly hair who's always sketching minuscule heads on a note-book instead of paying attention to who's coming and going, “FBI's most effective security breach”, she tells him one day when she comes to work with a huge box he shows no interest in searching (records, Cooper let her put a player in the office, for slow days); the surveillance team, three overweight middle-aged men trapped in a small room full of malfunctioning screens, looking at the repetitive images of familiar faces walking through corridors over electric humming.

 

On a day she is bored, or maybe not completely sober yet, probably after a dance marathon when she simply couldn't have enough of Harry Belafonte, she winks at a camera and does a little act for them, a reminiscence of a _New York New York_ scene (she always kills that Liza Minelli's moves). Before she can make it to her floor, she's stopped by a short man with glasses who declares himself a fan and invites her to a “soap session” in the surveillance office later that night. This is when she discovers that the minute details of office life can be made significant by TV frames and static lines. Franck, Julio and Georg spend their day commenting on it, so much that it has become a fascinating, bigger-than-life soap-opera.

“Here comes Harry, right in time for Sol and Angela's exit, look, he's acting cool but you can tell he's slowing down… What will he do, which one does he want to see? Oh no he's not doing anything...ah, yes, a smile! Seen that, plain as day. He's after Sol, I've always said it.”

“Bullshit, that smile was for Angela, I saw his eyes, it was unmistakable. You're not as sharp as you once were, Franck.”

She learns about the existence of on-going bets about the Bureau, sometimes sentimental in nature, sometimes violent; the team especially love “those mad-men from the labs” who are “always punching one another and then pretend it's all about the dead”. They also have developed a passion for cafeteria slapstick comedy, and for the gallery of Cole's interlocutors facial expression (“from surprise to pain, not a long journey though”).

“But you're a great favorite too,” Julio tells her, as if she might take offense of not being a central character. “That time you made Barrow scram out of your way was just spectacular. And you always walk the hallways like it's a catwalk and you'd prefer to be anywhere else but, what the hell, since you're there you might as well parade.”

“Now that's your twisted interpretation of it, Jul, I just think she loves shows in general; you just proved it this morning, didn't you Diane?”

She's not sure she wants to discuss her attitude on surveillance cameras with doubtful hermeneuts like those, but something on the screen catches her eyes.

“Who's that?”

It's a weirdly dressed man with a brush cut like a low fire and a feline step that makes her instantly nervous. He's looking directly at the camera from the corridor in which he is walking, as if he wants to crush it with his hands. She knows he can see her through it. They all watch, hypnotized for a moment before Julio tells her:

“We don't know his name, an agent we suppose, but he's always gone when we try to check on his corridors. He's on your floor most of the time, so we conjectured he was working with Cole. There are all kind of loons coming and going in that office, I tell you. And one or two gorgeous women too. But he comes down often, asking us for the tapes, so I cannot show you.”

Suddenly, the fascinating man stops and stands, still staring at the camera.

“There's something special about his face but I cannot...”

The screen flickers and snow superimposes to the man's silhouette, blurring the images with accidental shadows.

“Oy, no, it's always doing this, gear's lousy!” says Franck, hitting on the TV.

 

After leaving the surveillance office, she finds she is left with very little memories of what the man actually looked like.

 

***

 

A week or two after her Albert love spell, Cooper had told her, watching her very intently, that he was to work on a case with a certain Doctor Rosenfield.

“Which means, if I'm not mistaken, that I'm going to meet the man with whom you appear to be so taken, and more importantly, that you get to go to the labs right now to bring these forms to him. Please send him my regards, and whatever it is you wish to send him, Diane, that I can only hope he will appreciate to its true value.”

She was already on her feet and humming a giddy tune. The poor, poor man. She had no idea what he expected from this mission, but if it was some generic “ideal man” of his fancy, he was in for a wild ride.

When she knocks at the lab door this time, a young man in a suit, wearing dark glasses, opens it for her. She thought Albert was a solitary soul, but she soon catches sight of him surrounded by three other similar men, wearing lab coats over their expensive-looking black jackets. She can see at least two more in the back, tidying up God knows what. The room is already so dark the glasses are completely nonsensical, and from there they all look the same to her. Albert is the only one who seems entitled to a face of his own, even if that face is still wearing that incredibly jaded expression she admired last time. She tears herself away from the uncanny scene, to say in a jolly tone she knows he will hate:

“Hello hello, it's the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

Albert's frown intensifies, but he's obviously pleased:

“And here's my headache coming back. I had more or less hoped you'd forgotten the way to my den, but just like Cher's acting career, not everything in life turns out well.”

“Is that reproach I sense in your monotonous voice, Doctor Rosenfield?”

“And is it a social call,” he sighs “have you come all the way from the top floor to bread my hair, or do we have, as they say in New York, business together?”

She sits on a white-tiled counter that has probably seen its share of disgusting organic things, and the closest man in black manages to convey disapproval through an enduring stone-like expression.

“Both, actually. You're getting a case with Agent Cooper, you lucky bastard. So I've got those nice forms for you to fill, and an extended invitation to our office, where, I add, you'll find exceptional coffee and no small amount of apples.” She lets her voice softens a bit, it would be tiring if they were to keep that pace forever, no matter how much she likes it. At the end of the day, she hopes they will find a friendlier rhythm, lively but maybe a bit gentler. “Come, he's dying to meet you, after the portrait I painted him from last time.”

Albert looks like someone who needs a cigarette, and indeed takes one out, regardless of all sanitary regulations. Before he can even move, one of his – bloody hell, now she will never be able to use another word – one of his _minions_ rushes in and presents a lighter to his mouth. The small flame springs briefly in the lab's subdued atmosphere, and she marvels at those mute servants to Albert, God of Temper.

He comes to lean on her counter, having a look at the paperwork, and she says, swinging her legs back and forth:

“Are some of them only terrified, or are they really all in love with you? God, do you manufacture those guys?”

Albert raises an eyebrow and breathes out a cloud of smoke in her face.

“ _Our_ office? Is he really that good-looking?”

Point taken, although she would really need to learn more about why a normal forensic agent has a whole team of lighter-bearers at his disposition, even if he apparently gives hell to the rest of his colleagues. Which reminds her:

“I hate saying that, but he's a really good person, so please don't play it too harsh on him, or I'll come and visit everyday with fresh colors on my face until you just beg for mercy.”

Albert gives a low whistle and half-smile to her: “Now you're making it sound almost enticing. I've got to see the man who got the Alabama girl on a leash, he must be a real piece of work.”

 

She comes up the stairs with a folded memo that says (since he always expected her to open it anyway): “I will come to see you tomorrow afternoon, if that's fine by you. In the meantime, may I require you do something about that insufferable secretary of yours. My suggestions are either convent or marriage, at your convenience. AR”

When Cooper raises his eyes from the note, looking a bit unsure about what he has been reading, he tells her:

“Well Diane. I think he likes you too.”

 

***

 

After the first six months, since she shouldn't be narcissistic and only thinks about how many people she has managed to make afraid of her in such a short period of time, there are also talks of Cooper in the air. It comes, curiously, soon after Albert has expressed his great respect for the man by not insulting his entire family tree or making disparaging assumptions about his IQ on their first meeting. She was monitoring that interview with hawk eyes, and took most of the fire, for the team. It's impossible to insult Cooper without feeling very low anyway, even Albert cannot manage it.

The news come a few days later, Gordon Cole is sending him on a drug case in Atlanta, something short and easy, he tells her in a tone that she almost think one would be entitled to call apologetic.

“Can I redecorate in your absence?” she asks innocently. “I was thinking mirror balls and Terry Riley posters, nothing too extravagant.”

“What if,” he says resting his hands on her desk, “you disappear with a band before I come back? I worry about that constantly, you know: I've been told it was very common for all those “boys bands” to recruit local choristers and tempt them with a life of fame on the road.”

She looks at him with great pity, and is about to embark upon an explanation as to why it is offensive to be reduced to a mere groupie, but she finds herself momentarily distracted by the thought of an empty office. A Coop-less office. The beige walls have never looked so beige.

“Will you call me? I mean how are we suppose to communicate, will you be sending tapes?”

“I think I will. But you have no reason to worry, you're obviously better with a type-writer than I am with a gun.”

“It's all thanks to the beat, baby,” she smiles, while he gathers his things.

“Well, Diane, I'll see you in two weeks.” He then assumes a very typical mask of formality to explain:

“But I've just come to realize that I never took care of leaving you with instructions to dispose of my body and possessions, should I, by dim sight, die in the field. Now there is a family vault in...”

“Cooper,” she interrupts with both eyebrows so high it feels like her whole face is stretching. “You are not to die in the field. Period. This is your first case, this is a small case, you are, as they keep telling me when you're not around, the finest recruit ever seen in generations, so don't you dare dying on me before having the occasion of giving me a raise. Think of all the paperwork that would leave me with. Think of the poor bamboo who would have to grow up alone with such a terrible role-model. Think of all the pies that would stay uneaten. And above all, think about the fact that they could send me to work for Chet Desmond if you die. Chet Desmond, Cooper. I wouldn't outlive you by a month.”

She grabs his shoulder with a reassuring hand and gives him a friendly squeeze.

“You'll do splendidly, like you always do. And we'll see about the morbid details when you get assigned bigger cases, okay?”

He puts his hand over hers, and suddenly she's afraid too.

 

***

 

The first tapes come only a few days after his landing. She's very grateful for them, despite Pam's warnings; it's certainly not the same thing to eat one's daily apple alone, and she's even forced to call Albert in his office from time to time for some human contact, which is about the saddest thing one could do. She puts in the earplugs of her brand new professional Walkman, feeling very much like Gordon Cole in a skirt, a thought that keeps her entertained until she finds how to rewind it.

She expects nothing in particular, but when she hears the first words, something shifts inside of her. Those are very business-like words, not even full sentences; Cooper is listing his meals and his first hotel bills. By the sound of it, he's in a rather cheap motel, and she begins to feel sorry for him, since Atlanta is punishment enough, in her opinion, not to add bed bugs and rusty mattress springs to the equation. She bets it's rainy, the background noise has that kind of humid quality she identifies particularly well, having spend all her childhood holidays in Vermont. This might be depressing Atlanta, but that, for sure, is a Finger Lakes sound. She realizes after a while that she has begun to imagine Cooper in a squalid motel room overlooking a crystal pond, but there's a strange accent to his voice that brings her back to his monotonous bullet points. He's growing distressed, she can sense it, his voice a bit strangled just like that time when she purposefully curbed his coffee privileges. The recording stops in the middle of a sentence, and she looks at her Walkman, intrigued. Almost immediately, a second take begins, in a very, very different way.

 

“Diane”

 

she hears, and there is something in the way he says it that makes her typing fingers tremble, because he's always saying her name with this sort of intensity, but never has he sounded more focused, graver, as if he were performing a ritual of sorts, trying to invoke her, to hold her attention all the way from Atlanta. He's establishing a link between them, something that ties her and compels her to his words while he is pulling a thread all over six States. He's here, she thinks. Now she can really hear him breathe.

 

“Diane”

 

he repeats, and suddenly she's moved, because it makes it look like he's unsure she'll be listening to him at all, as if she might loose interest and leave him alone at his end of the recorder.

“Listen, I'm very sorry. It occurred to me, in the course of my first recording, that was I was really doing was talking to myself, and then an image of you sprung in my mind, and it struck me as frankly disrespectful to ignore the fact that you're a human being, a very valuable human being, may I add, who will be listening to that tape in your office, probably alone, with the intention of completing your task seriously. And, you see, I am not comfortable with the idea of holding you in my power, for this is power in a way, by forcing you to listen to asinine lists. I cannot talk to you like this, Diane, it felt entirely wrong for me to be this robotic, especially to you. Then I expect you'll be laughing at me by now, which you never fail to do every time I deserve it, and I understand that is quite often.”

She's laughing indeed, but her mirth is far less cutting that what he imagines, has imagined; wait, is he here right now, or rather, when was that, is this Cooper, expressing his discomfort, existing two days in her past? When was this recorded?

“It's June 23rd, weather is rotten, and to be perfectly honest, I fear you might have been right about Atlanta.”

She's experiencing a special kind of what she knows to be interactional delusion: she's having an imaginary conversation with an unidentified Cooper from 48-hours ago, and the fact that it is going so smoothly impresses her on a greater scale than almost anything her boss has done so far in her actual presence.

“It might sound ridiculous to you, in your familiar environment in Philadelphia, but it is quite hard for me to imagine that you're really there. Are you really there, Diane? Now look at me, asking questions to a recorder. Even if you technically won't be able to look anywhere, at least not before they improve these things tremendously. You must pardon me, I'm slowly getting used to the feeling of addressing what I suspect may be a compromise between the image of you I have kept in my mind, and the real you, the person who sits in that Formica chair – shouldn't we ask for new ones at some point? I remember we agreed they were quite awful for one's back – with her signature bob of hair and clinking bracelets. I hope you're not listening to any upbeat music, as you sometimes do: I don't want to sound presumptuous, but it is already difficult enough for me to make my way through this void and to you.”

Dear old Cooper, always methodical, even in the midst of an existential crisis. She lets the fondness spreads like icing on a cake, to cover the fact that he is very right: she too is shaken by the fragility of the link, the weak hold she has on his voice; every form of control she possesses, rewinding or pausing the record, too plainly wrong, too obviously violent to be used without due consideration.

“Who would have thought a tape-recorder would condense so many irrational fears, Diane? Maybe I'm just nervous about the case. But this is such a dangerous channel of communication, because I can't help but reflect on the possibility that you will be unable to listen to this tape, for reasons unknown to me. If I try to anticipate, anything might come up: the tape can be lost in the mail, Roger may loose it, although he has always proved very reliable, but a mistake happens so easily; some urgent task may present itself and you may forget about the tape, even if I have trouble imagining you would ever do that, Diane. And then, it only gets worse. You could fall sick, and be unable to come to work before I'm even back from Atlanta. There could be an accident. What if you're not there when I come back, what if all I find is an empty office and a dead bamboo?”

Oh, boy. His breathing, she can hear, is more labored, and she nervously wonders if he thought of bringing his VaporRub with him. She makes a mental note of asking him about whatever it was he wanted to instruct her about his will and testament, for he clearly is too fixated on funeral thoughts, and that indicates some unresolved concern they should address as soon as possible. She can only imagine of course, but after more than six months of paperwork and distant investigations, one can forget the dangers of being an FBI agent. Hell, she forgot about them too, and now there is this vulnerable Cooper, or this version of him, possibly unknown to her or out of her reach, who's afraid she might die, who's afraid he might die. He is far from home, and everything is new. It dawns on her that, until now, she had never really believed the perfect Dale Cooper could experience fear.

Suddenly the recording ends again. She feels a huge wave of panic crashing on her, her heartbeat escalating furiously, and she doesn't understand what is happening, only that she wants to cry and to hit the 'play' button again, until the click of yet another take is heard.

 

“Diane, it's me again, but a more reasonable me, I hope. I thought it best to interrupt my last record, given the unproductive train of thoughts I was beginning to embark upon. Once again, my apologies, my intent was not to distress you. I've collected my spirits now, thanks to a well-needed cup of coffee. Not as good as yours, obviously, but close enough that life appears under a more favorable light.”

 

What time is it? She forgot to make coffee today. She tries to bring her respiration back to normal; she is panting, and confused about her physical reaction to a magnetic tape coming to a pause. So at least he found some of comfort, although not knowing about the time gap, the minuscule pause, merely seconds, that had her hyperventilating and during which he apparently teleported to some diner or other and then back to wherever he was before (it's the same background sound, she's certain) bothers her much more than it probably should. Control, it seems, really is an issue for both of them, if not at the same level.

Another thought stops her in her track. She forgot to make coffee. She could have fallen sick, and not been in the office at all, he says. Is this Cooper from the past talking to a future Diane? He must be. But is it her, or did she miss the right time, the time he imagined for her, the slot he necessarily designed in his mind when recording the tapes? Is she the wrong Diane, standing in someone else's dancing shoes right now? What if she had only listened to them the following day? She might be giving herself a headache.

“I am standing in my room, in a motel which particulars you already know about. How can I describe it to you, Diane? Imagine the inside of a vent in the smocking area of a small restaurant that only serves fry dishes.”

And then he goes on. It's a story, she realizes after a while, he's really narrating his mission to her, and he takes trouble to keep her entertained, giving lively details and sketching colorful characters like the two suspects, a tall man and a small one, a quasi burlesque pair that she wants to yell at, from time to time, for being such poorly efficient gangsters. At least Cooper should be back very soon, with these unworthy opponents. She is forced to listen to the tape again, because he has forgotten to take notes; in his way, he is providing her information for her reports, but she cannot type his exact words, it would be spectacularly long and unorthodox. Since she's not transcribing faithfully, she has to rewrite his accounts, to extract the official data, to reshape some of Cooper's actions (namely to rationalize his crazy intuitions, just in case Cole or any other supervisor would be tempted to question his methods, although she suspects that, when it comes to Cole, unorthodox might do quite well), to organize the facts, even to make some assumptions from the material she is given. Nothing too wild but, as she comes to understand, even in something as apparently straightforward as a mission memo, some elements are bound to be slightly interpretative.

More tapes come in, and by the end of the first week they have find their rhythm, past Cooper and future Diane, forever separated by the course of acoustic waves, reaching out, brushing at each other from an immaterial space between voice and ear, forever vibrating.

 

When he comes back, ten days later, he stops at the door of the office, and she looks at him with new eyes. She doesn't know what to make of his body now, after spending so much time alone with his voice. He says:

 

“Diane”

 

and she almost wants to be dramatic about it. But then, he has brought peaches from Atlanta, so there's really nothing she can do.

 

***

 

It is around that time that she gets a glimpse, from afar, of a woman wrangling more than walking her way to Gordon Cole's office. She's with Pam on what has become her morning coffee routine, the woman is progressing with some difficulty, swaying as if there was bossa nova in the air, her dress a bright blue and she doesn't know why, but she stays stuck. Pam whispers in her ear:

“That's Lil. You'll see her around from time to time. I mean you'll notice her. I don't know much more, some agents say she's Director Cole's sweetheart, but I cannot picture that, not at all. They're just annoyed because only three or four have been introduced to her and they won't say a thing. I tried talking to her once or twice, but she doesn't answer. I'm not sure she talks at all.”

She stares at the woman, an oddly triangular face.

“Tell me you didn't use the word “sweetheart” as an attribute. Please. Give me something that helps me cling to the actual year, I beg you. You're really 65, you know that.”

Pam waves it away and she is left with a metallic taste in her mouth. That really was a strange blue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "She always killed that Lizza Minelli's moves": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLeC9RvrKrU
> 
> Next time: Diane's never ending string of suitors, space bowities, a bit of a situation, "the problem with Gordon", penguin jokes, big bad wolves, tie knots, and a dance. Stay tuned, the waves are coming back to you soon.


	4. Rehearsals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter you will find:  
> Something generous.  
> Something spacey and Bow-ey  
> Something slapstick, or maybe not so much.  
> Something rehearsed and something borrowed.  
> Something bittersweet.  
> Something glittery.  
> Something shippy (yes, you can skip to that part if you have to).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay folks, today we are going full meta. Today you might also want to look for the not-so-hidden Twin Peaks bits. I want to stress that this is a really important chapter, one I was fully committed to, because it deals with some of the major issues I want to tackle in this fic. It probably tries to be too mysterious and too deep, but bear with me, it's just that I have so many thoughts about the series' aesthetics and meaning. 
> 
> I think it's safe to say that the canon offers a complex reflection on its own medium, although it's not always clear in which ways (but that's what makes it so fascinating in the first place). I mean, Lynch's part, for God's sake (probably literally).  
> So note that this is of course a love story, but a love story that is concerned with questions about images, filming, and representation in general. Records. Records are so important. This is a tale of identity, all over time and space and sound and color. That's why I try and keep referencing it; the songs are always important (and, most of the time, groovy).

 

They don't really talk about the tapes. For their defense, it's a rather hard thing to do, talking about them; they more or less speak for themselves.

 

So she keeps looking at him. But touching him, that seems completely out of her range.

 

***

 

She always had suitors; it is a natural thing for her, and one that participates in the balance of her existence. She likes men (and women, occasionally), and men seem to like her well enough, so she doesn't see why she should refrain from going out and enjoying company. The Bureau doesn't pay her enough to own her evenings. Besides, dating has always been a part of her cultural life: she needs to share her thoughts on this or that photographer, to have someone to argue with over the movie choice, and someone who can play the piano she keeps in her apartment, despite all reasonable limitations of space.

Cooper never asked her about that part of her life. So she doesn't even forbid them to send gifts at work. Flowers, boxes of everything, perfume, poems more often than not, because that is the kind of guys she dates, but sometimes it's a bottle of wine, and on a memorable occasion, champagne, because she knows to be practical, too. Roger, the home courier, takes it with a long-suffering air, but she knows he likes to make a show of delivering every item, especially the extravagant ones. At any rate it's much more interesting that the usual official mail.

“Another spray of orchids for the Queen of Sheba, if you please.”

Every time Cooper eyes her with reverence, raising his brows appreciatively and jokes about the offerings, asking her if she lives in a temple made of chocolate boxes and tiger lilies. She generally answers that, if he does not give her a raise pretty soon, she might well have to build herself a house out of cardboard. Sometimes he calls her “the ever so popular Diane”, and strangely that stings a little when he does.

 

There are few women, but they are always meaningful, because she really has to invest herself in order to date them; women don't throw themselves at your head when you're a girl in 1978 Philly, and you can be as dashing as you want, it doesn't change a thing. Dating women is hard, it has always been harder, and thus rarer, but the consequence is – good or bad, she would be at lost to tell – she remembers every one of them with marked contour lines. For reasons that she has no desire to decipher, the two women she dates during her first five years in the Bureau both work in theaters: the first one is a costume designer who's in love with the way her body inhabits every kind of clothes, and who says she might sew her a dress of Diane huntress, the Greek goddess who shot arrows at every admirer because she wanted to be left alone.

The second one is an actress. She observes the way her face changes from one role to the other, and wonders about her soul; but that's really an awful way to look at it, and Helen explains it one day, when she is tired of being scrutinized and suspected, explains to her that playing a part is not about lying. It's not faking either, but it can be considered some sort of education. It's not so much that you becomes someone else, it's that you create different versions of yourself to which you borrow knowledge, experience that you didn't possess in the first place. It's a simulation of a different life, an alternative incarnation that can be so enlightening. There are emotions she learned that way, – is it a terrible thing, to learn emotions? – situations she never encountered in every day life but still understands on a certain scale, because she had the lines traced for her through a role.

“It's exactly like literature, you see? You're not some psychotic teenager or some bored to death provincial housewife, but you know how that feels, because you've read _The Catcher in the Rye_ and _Madame Bovary_. And the knowledge lingers. There is no need to be afraid. We're as alive as anyone else.”

 

After a few months, they call her to play a bigger part in a Broadway production, so she leaves. The last kiss she gives her lasts for something like an hour, and she feels that she is loosing direction.

 

****

One slow day, hotness melting like butter over Philadelphia, and more specifically over her office, which decidedly lacks a good venting system; the air seems more solid than it should be. In addition, the neon light has been buzzing oddly all morning, and it's beginning to grate on her, as if someone were dragging a wet finger over the glass panel.

She is playing her new B-52's record, for motivation, and she's typing along with “Rock Lobster” when she discovers she's not alone in the room anymore. A frightfully beautiful man is standing in front of her desk, and he looks familiar, but for the moment she fails to place him. His features are sharp and delicate like an ice sculpture, and his light hair falls on his forehead in a soft, rather romantic wave. The hair is different, she thinks, and it echoes in her head insistently. Different from what? She doesn't know. Different.

He is looking at his surroundings with curiosity, and something she finds predatory, although it might be the way he moves, the way he's holding his body, as if it couldn't stop moving, fluidly and imperceptibly, while he is standing there, immobile.

 

“Which one are you?” he asks abruptly, with a voice too high-pitched, strangely modulated, like he is talking to her from far away.

If the expected answer to that question is “Agent Cooper's secretary”, well, fuck him, mysterious stranger or not. She doesn't appreciate unannounced intrusions in her office that are followed with inquiries vague as hell, and she has heard this kind of phrasing before, in the mouth of the most disrespectful agents. She is not a number attached to a type-writer, and she is certainly not a receptionist, so she says:

“What about you?”

The man laughs and murmurs “Good answer”, before taking a few steps in the direction of her record-player. The way he walks gives the impression that he's submitted to a different kind of gravity, his moves so elastic it's a miracle he's standing at all, body limp, eyes blazing.

“It's nice to see you're educated. Few of them are. But Gordon's choices are often… adequate.”

It suddenly clicks, what has been disturbing her in his face: his eyes are of two different colors, giving him this alien look.

“Interesting choice of music. I might sing something for you, then. Exotic. Your heart is loud and you want to shut my mouth, I can tell, but it will only be to tease.”

She's so lost she can only use automatic reactions and hope she will float with the current:

“Why are you here?”

The man refocuses on her, coming very close to where she sits and bends to face her, articulating:

“Cooper?”

“He's not here,” she says. “He is away on a mission for two days. I suggest you make an appointment next time.”

She resumes typing, hoping to make him leave by sheer rudeness; it usually works. Nevertheless, the man only tilts his head, examining her nails.

“Oh, I see. That loud. My oh my,” he taunts, straightening up, “you know, I might try different filters, with you.”

As he says it, he places a hand over one of his eyes, then winks at her, and repeats it with the other eye. One green, one blue. She stares at her typing fingers, praying for him to go.

 

When she looks up again, he is nowhere to be seen.

 

****

Nine months into the Bureau, and Cooper is leaving for his first long-term case, some arms trafficking over the Mexican border. He will be away for two months or so, and she tells him to say hello to every passing karaoke for her, but she doesn't really have the heart to joke so much about it. He says:

“I'll be with you by way of tapes.”

And she says:

“Will you?” Because will he, really? That point hasn't been cleared up.

He doesn't answer, but puts his hands on both her shoulders, apparently about to say something, when a very loud Gordon Cole enters the office without preamble.

 

“FOLKS, I HATE TO INTERRUPT, BUT I HAVE A BIT OF A SITUATION AND I WOULD APPRECIATE A HAND IN FIXING IT.”

They are both very good at hiding their jumps, but there are limits and those limits have just been crossed.

While taking an appreciative look to what has become their office's unusual decoration, random bouquets in mismatching vases, piles of records, basket of apples, the well-loved bamboo and a brand-new map of Tibet Cooper still has to explain himself about, Cole continues:

“IT APPEARS THAT MY SECRETARY FLEW THE COOP, NO PUN INTENDED. SHE LEFT ME A NOTE, STATING SHE WAS ELOPING WITH A MAGICIAN FROM ACAPULCO. NOW I FIND THAT A BIT FICKLE, BUT SHE SEEMS QUITE SERIOUS ABOUT IT.”

The small piece of paper he is holding is covered with a sophisticated handwriting and, more strikingly, numerous lipstick kisses. She eyes Cooper.

“What can we do to help, Director Cole?” he says eventually, because their interlocutor shows no sign of wanting to give his cock-and-bull story more ground.

“I'VE ALREADY TOLD YOU TO CALL ME GORDON, I'M NOT THE POPE. I WAS THINKING THAT MAYBE, IF IT'S NOT TOO INCONVENIENT DIANE, YOU COULD REPLACE HER TEMPORARILY, SINCE COOPER IS GOING AWAY.”

And he just stands there, blinking at them expectantly. The nerve of that man is beyond all measure. Cooper looks at her, completely out of his depths, while she is raising desperate eyebrows at the lipstick-covered note. Cole's idea of a secretary seems a bit too exotic right now, but he intruded on their moment, and they are both very off-beat. After a whole minute of making faces at each other in silence, Cole says:

“WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR WHAT YOU ARE SAYING, YOU'LL HAVE TO SPEAK LOUDER.”

 

Fuck Gordon. Fuck him sideways, none of this is even making any sense, and can she please have a moment to say goodbye to her boss, shielded from the usual craziness of this place, like a normal person? She braces herself and turns to him.

“Of course, that's not a problem Director Cole,” she manages. She won't be alone, then. On the lower side, she'll probably be deaf by the time Cooper comes back.

“FOR GOD'S SAKE, IT'S GORDON TO YOU TOO, DIANE. I FEEL LIKE I'M TALKING IN THE DESERT SOMETIMES, ARE YOU PEOPLE EVEN LISTENING TO ME?”

 

****

It is only later, when she's trying to find the right place to install her bamboo in Cole's gigantic office, that the thought strikes her she has no idea what his secretary has been doing all this time. She didn't know her well, the woman was famous for pulling seemingly infinite chains of handkerchiefs out of her sleeves, so at least there is coherence in absurdity, but apart from that she is clueless. The light in this room is uncommonly subdued, and for some reason there is a whole wall representing a lake scenery in the background. A sunny lake scene, in this shadowy place. It looks like Vermont. Fuck Gordon. If the bamboo dies from lack of sunlight, she will have his scalp.

Pretty soon, it becomes apparent that Gordon's plans for her as a secretary are about as remote from the traditional requirements of the job as she could have expected. Most of the time, he gives her nothing specific to do and she just resumes her work for Cooper. It's an unsettling experience, listening to the tapes she keeps receiving, trying to hide how much it shakes her, trying not to laugh too loudly when Cooper begins his takes with bits of Spanish sentences in an accent so terrible it almost sounds German, while Gordon sits in his chair, looking dreamily at the lamp as if he were listening to a tape of his own, a very long and very deep tape. She observes him a good deal, then: it's a fascinating spectacle.

“The problem with Gordon.”

She struggles to explain things to Pam on a lunch break, but the issue is complex, and then it doesn't help that Pam cringes every time she dares calling the all-mighty and whimsical director by his first name, “the problem with Gordon is that, in your heart of hearts, you know he has power, he must have, surely, but he doesn't look the part at all. He's the director but, most of the time, he seems on the verge of loosing interest. Like he is just watching us come and go and fret about gruesome murders, and wondering what could be setting us in motion. Sometimes I see him, there are major cases to crack, urgent ones, and he sits there in his office, starring at his Kafka's poster, fiddling with his ear plugs for hours on, looking all melancholy. And then he laughs at something, no idea what, asks me for a Washington liaison, says “HAVE A LOOK INTO THE DRIVER'S BASEMENT!” and hangs up on the poor lads. And there: case solved. It's a fucking mystery.”

All in all, she is glad he has chosen her, despite her initial reservations. Even if he clearly knows how to have his way with people, it's a bit of a euphemism to say he isn't too keen on hierarchical traditions. Since she famously cannot behave, it suits her perfectly, and she tries to help herself, but soon she becomes so poorly guarded with him that she doesn't even remember not to roll her eyes every two minutes.

 

“TOP OF THE MORNING, DIANE. HOW DO YOU CALL A PENGUIN WHO'S WEARING A TIE?”

And of course, there are the jokes. The jokes really compel her to fall for him, the insufferable lady-killer.

“Well, hello to you too, Gordon.”

“NOPE, YOU CALL HIM JOE!”

She stares at him with a stony expression she borrowed from Albert. His round blue eyes are full of malice, and he gives her a slow-growing smile, eventually stating:

“PENGUIN JOKES NEVER FAIL TO KEEP ME HAPPY.”

She'll never admit it with a gun to her face, but sadly sometimes you just have to love Gordon.

 

One day, she has just finished listening to her tapes and in an attempt to distract herself from missing Cooper, she asks:

“Gordon, why on earth do you have a picture of Vermont in your office?”

He eyes her curiously before answering.

“AH, IT'S NOT VERMONT, BUT YOU'RE PRETTY CLOSE THOUGH. IT'S WASHINGTON STATE, NEAR COLVILLE. LOOK AT THOSE PINES.”

Pretty close doesn't exactly covers it, except if they are talking mirror geography. His expression remains unreadable for a few minutes, and after a while he adds:

“DON'T YOU WORRY, HE'LL BE BACK SOON.”

 

***

She makes his appointments, a few phone calls and memos, but on the whole, the essence of her job is of a much stranger nature. She should be worried about it, and yet she is not, she cannot find it in herself to be. Gordon may be as absurd as he wants, everything always comes out naturally; it's another magic trick, there are no other words for it, as far as she is concerned.

 

It starts with little things. It starts with repetitions.

 

“COULD YOU DO THAT AGAIN FOR ME, SWEETHEART?”

“Gordon, don't “sweetheart” me, it's diminishing. The whole Bureau has a problem with that. And what on earth are you talking about?”

“THIS,” he says, ignoring her acerbic remark. “THAT EXACT GESTURE, THE THING YOU'VE DONE WITH YOUR HAND WHEN I ASKED ABOUT DESMOND.”

“Well, what about it?”

“COULD YOU DO IT AGAIN, PLEASE? EXACTLY THE SAME GESTURE.”

She complies, and redoes her little annoyed movement of fingers in the air while Gordon watches with extreme concentration, taking in the scene.

“PERFECT. THANK YOU DIANE.”

 

There. This is where it starts. And once it has started, there is no reason to stop.

 

***

 

Another day, when she's still bone-tired from whatever it was she was doing last night – the only thing she knows for certain on the subject is that there were eleven cocktail umbrellas in her hair when she woke up – he's complaining about Washington politics and the timorousness of the Central Bureau, and without thinking she lets out:

“Oh well, fuck Washington.”

A beat of horror later, she's looking at his joyful face and he says:

“I HAVEN'T HEARD A WORD OF THAT. DO YOU WANT A CIGARETTE?”

 

After their customary smoking break, he comes to her desk as she is annotating his weekly schedule, and watches her until she looses patience and raises her head to see what he wants.

“DIANE, I HAVE AN APPOINTMENT WITH THE BIG BOSS IN WASHINGTON PRETTY SOON, AND I THINK I MIGHT NEED A LITTLE PRACTICE. DO YOU THINK YOU COULD PRETEND TO BE HIM, AND INTERVIEW ME? IT WON'T TAKE LONG.”

To be fair, it sounds like much more fun that her current task, and her head is throbbing, so she doesn't see why she shouldn't play along. Gordon begins to explain her role: she's a man in her fifties, and slightly suspicious that he might be up to something; she's not cunning by nature, but she wants to appear up to the game and to suggest, in the course of the conversation, that she knows more than she's letting out. He adds that she is a tad annoyed by his behavior and general peculiarity, and Diane is tempted to laugh. He even specifies she'll be disturbed by volumes issues, the adorable idiot.

She tries to imagine that she holds half the country in her hand, instead of her customary apple, and considers the strange case of Gordon Cole, potential mischief-maker. She can understand why Washington worries. Furthermore, the course of the conversation leads her to think, huge as it may seem, that Gordon is actually acting as a bit of a free spirit when it comes to national orders. She doesn't know a thing about that project he is talking about, a task force she surmises, but she's gradually getting the feeling that he is giving her information that he really should keep to himself.

“What's the name of that little team of yours, again?” she asks to buy time, while at the same time trying very hard to imagine she is sporting a mustache.

“BLUE ROSE.”

She stares at him for a second, doesn't it, doesn't it sound a bit familiar.

 

They end the game quickly after that, and Gordon congratulates her on her subtle performance. She feels like she forgot half his instructions in the course of the dialogue, captivated as she had been, but he seems to think it only added to the exchange.

“YOU'RE REALLY GOOD AT THOSE THINGS, DIANE.”

 

And she really is.

 

***

 

She's been working for him for a month and a half when they reach the turning point. They've been roleplaying on occasions ever since that time. Sometimes, he has lines written down for her to read, sometimes it's pure improvisation. Her top performance being, without a doubt, “Albert”, a role she has trouble getting out of, after his warm applause and the beginning of a mocked Oscar speech. Oddly though, she has trouble remembering exactly what that conversation was about.

She has just hanged up on agent Barrow, calling him the lovechild of William J. Simmons and a brain-damaged slug, and she is apoplectic.

“Christ, Gordon, why is it that people in here are so backward? Is the actual year something so hard to keep up to? Isn't there anything you can do about that?”

Gordon looks at her with something akin to fascination, as if he has never seen a furious woman before, when she suspects it might really be his daily lot.

“DO YOU KNOW HE TRIED TO REGISTER SEVERAL COMPLAINTS ABOUT YOU?”

She should be more worried about the fact, but right now she just cannot find it in herself to care, or to wonder why she's never heard about them.

“The utter jerk,” she mutters, hoping Gordon will have the good grace to pretend he didn't hear.

“I TOLD HIM HE SHOULD STOP WHATEVER IT WAS HE WAS DOING IF HE DIDN'T WANT TO END UP HIS CARRIER DUSTING COUNTERS IN A TEA-SHOP IN MAINE.”

It wasn't that she was surprised, exactly, Cole was notably partial, and the agents he didn't want to work with could find themselves in a sorry plight if they tried to resist orders, but she didn't take him for one who would care or even realize about those issues. It was a terrible thing to think, all in all. There is sadness in his innocent face when he tells her:

“I FEAR WE ARE NOT VERY UP-TO-DATE.”

 

After that, he spends two hours starring right in front of him, dead to this world, at the last bunch of young peonies Roger delivered for her. From the corner of her eye, she sees him scribble something on a paper, then cross out, scribble again. Eventually, he walks to her desk and says with gravity:

“WOULD YOU PLAY SOMETHING WITH ME?”

She nods and finds herself seated on the office's couch, a notepad in her hands. He gives her the paper: there are a few lines on it, slightly undulant. Uncharacteristically, he doesn't say anything to her.

“Who am I?”

He shrugs.

“I DON'T REALLY KNOW BUT IT DOESN'T MATTER FOR NOW. SOME TEENAGE GIRL, NO MORE THAN 13 I WOULD SAY.”

He doesn't say who he is either, but goes out of the office and enters it again looking mildly distressed. She looks down on her notes, the text apparently random:

“Which do you like better: “the blossom of the evening” or “the full flower of the evening”?” she reads slowly, tempted to savor the unexpected words that ring marvelously, like the promise of a pacified, comfortable night filled with hushed conversations. This script is beautiful.

“NO, LISTEN, THIS IS SERIOUS.”

“Well this is serious too!” Gordon's loud voice is trying to drag her from the sound scenery the words had painted for her and she is reluctant to let go.

“I'M GOING OUT OF THE WINDOW IN A FEW MINUTES AND I NEED YOU TO COVER FOR ME.”

“Aren't you aware that there's a curfew? They just announced it on the radio.”

Of course, there is a radio, that seems very right, she can just feel it, a quiet night and the low voices of the radio, chanting far away songs and the shipping forecast, before sleep.

“YES I KNOW THERE'S A CURFEW, EINSTEIN, THAT'S WHY I NEED YOU TO COVER FOR ME.”

Gordon walks to a window, they are on the 4 th  floor and she wants to eye him disapprovingly.

“I suppose this will include a phone conversation with Mike, Mr Bone-Head Boyfriend.”

And then she wants to laugh but Gordon says something, something quite, he, and then

 

“NO, THIS IS ABOUT LAURA. AND IT'S REALLY, REALLY SERIOUS.”

 

Her ears are ringing painfully, and the room shivers a little.

“Check,” she finally mutters.

Her head is killing her, the ringing doesn't stop. She tries very hard to focus on the window before which Gordon is standing, looking at her with something like pride and a bit of concern.

“Gordon,” she says suddenly “Gordon I think I saw a strange man in my office, some time ago. His eyes were of different colors, and he never said his name. I had forgotten about him, isn't it… strange?”

He sighs and comes to kneel in front of the couch, taking both her hands into his. This is a ceremony. She has trouble getting a stable image of his face, but she can hear him quite clearly, as if he were not yelling, as if she was far enough that she could hear him to the right volume.

 

“Now listen carefully, this is very important. There was once a little red riding hood who lived in a house near the forest. At night she could hear the trees creaking and the owls hooting. One day, her grand-mother fell sick, and her mother asked her to bring her some fresh coffee and donuts, all the way through the woods. It was a long walk, but she went diligently.

Little did the little red riding hood know that, while she was traveling among the firs, the big bad wolf had come to her grand-mother house and devoured her. The little red riding hood was very focused on her task, so when she knocked on the door, she heard her grand-mother's voice, greeting her. She expected her grand-mother smell, so her grand-mother smell was everywhere. When she walked to her room, the person she saw lying there looked like her grand-mother, and was wearing her clothes. And when she took the food out of her basket, handing a cup of coffee, what she she saw was her grand-mother's hand, taking it.

But we who speak, we know it wasn't her grand-mother in these clothes, we know it wasn't her in that bed. When, to be sure, in a normal, better world where the tales aren't so dark, it indeed was. And so the little red riding hood's mind lingered in that world she was focusing on so strongly. If she, if we, were expecting that state of things to be true, doesn't it mean this other world must exist somewhere? It surely must.This other world of possibilities, where her grand-mother didn't open her door to a stranger earlier that day, could only stand very close to the world of the story, for the little red riding hood to be so confused, don't you think?

But is that it, really? Because if there are many folded worlds at a paper-thin distance of this one, why wasn't she seeing a duck, or a bear, dressed like an old woman? If there are so many possibilities, why did her eyes chose the one thing that would have her eaten before the end of the tale? And if she is so convinced, if she cannot trust her eye, can we be so sure we can trust ours? Why don't we see a duck in this bed, too? Why don't we see a bear?

Of what are we aware, and to what are we blind, we who tell this story with an ending that brings only death? Or more importantly, what is crucial here, what is really at stake, the one question that remains to be answered at all cost:”

 

“Who's that, in the bed?”

 

She answered in spite of herself. She never knew that, she had no idea that she knew that, but from now on there was no denying, ever, that she did. She squeezes Gordon's hands in her own with desperation, with something she cannot quite understand but which terrifies her with such force she could cry now, she could break every vase in the room, she could hug him and ask him to do something, to fix this mess, to fix that faulty universe of messed-up possibilities.

“That's good”, he whispers.

“Why are you telling me this?” she asks, almost sobbing, almost breaking, the ringing in her ears so intense it gives her nausea.

“It had to be done, I'm sorry. I couldn't let you on your own.”

He's giving light taps to each of her fingers, an oddly comforting gesture, and they wait until the ringing recedes, and the room's image is back to its original style. She straightens up and he says:

“I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, BUT I NEED A SMOKE.”

 

***

She wishes she could chain-smoke her way through those particular memories, while admittedly she doesn't remember them with much clarity, the effects similar to a drug trip, if she can trust her meager experience in a field where, by definition, nothing is to be trusted.

Gordon doesn't say much more, and he too looks exhausted and forlorn, so she doesn't press it as much as she should. Something like this should be pressed with a ton of bricks, but she has the intuition it would be like throwing marshmallows to a wall. Gordon is long gone, and drifting away by now. She has never seen someone so tired in her life, and she once was a waitress in a strip-club. “Once” meaning here “one time only”, because of course she was fired on the spot, but then it had been the pit of hell. So Gordon looks like a stripper now: like the world's imperfections are too heavy for him to cling to his pole anymore.

She remembers the words, all of them, going on and on in her head like an obsessive melody, the full blossom of the evening and the great unknown in the bed. Other worlds. There are just words for now though. Nothing has crystallized, nothing can make sense already, and she suspects it won't in quite some time.

She might want to write them down, dangerous as it sounds. It probably would spoil everything, but she needs a script of these incidents, a report, she needs a moderate amount of agency and clear-sightedness. What kind of a lesson was that, she wants to ask. And why her, among the pool of sinister rationalists vegetating around? Reality feels like such a hard and sharp thing right now. That sure wasn't a penguin in that bed.

 

****

Cooper comes back not long after that fateful day – she is unsure about the term, but there is an ominous quality about it, that is for certain. It has left her upset, and his return is not something she can take lightly.

Because there were so many tapes, this time. Almost one a day, for 71 days, with remarkable landscapes, food tips, the occasional anecdotes and sometimes, a personal memory. The tapes are her keepsakes, she treasures them, but they also are the frame of Past Cooper, Distant Cooper, the voice from afar, the whispers across space and time. The longer he's away, the more hybrid their relationship, sound and color, words and gestures going their separate ways, and it always feels as if one of them, or maybe two or more, is dying in the presence of the other.

Nevertheless, when he steps into the office, he doesn't say a thing and in an instant she is up, and hugging him tight, holding to him as to a rock. She knows who this is. She knows who this is.

It's unexpected, and he laughs a bit in her ear, saying:

“Haven't you eloped with a magician from Montgomery?”

She laughs too but it sounds like someone who wants to cry.

 

****

Today she came to the office with glitter dust all over her eyelids, and pink liner instead of her usual blue one. It's the Bureau annual Christmas party tonight, it's the end of December, that should give her reason enough to dress up. She wonders if she will be able to fool him, all her way to her desk. She sits down, refills her typewriter, waters the bamboo, tries to ignore him as long as possible, but at some point, when coffee gets involved, it becomes unavoidable, and as he takes a good look at her, she hears him gasp delightedly.

“Diane.”

To hell with him, he never fails to deliver.

“It's your birthday!”

She sighs. Of course he would know. She thought the Christmas party would be her umbrella; the problem is, she is quite attached to her birthday, so it was out of the question not to celebrate in some way or other, and she fully intended to bring the house down tonight: she has a right to be shinny. And hot-headed. And rude.

“I was sure the glitter would give me away, but a girl has to try.”

“No,” he says, probably planning her downfall. “It's just that you looked so fully yourself today.”

Well. Probably. It's her birthday. Yes, fuck him.

 

****

She's standing in a vast meeting-room that has been emptied for the occasion, and filled to the brim with multicolored balloons; it looks like an end-of-the-year charity fair, but the tinted spots soften the atmosphere to something mostly blue, pink and yellow, through plastic patches that could create a violent psychedelic effect if set up on quick pace; however the lights move very lazily across the walls, alternating from time to time, and the effect is rather one of superficial melancholy, evocative of Technicolor pictures of the past, an Audrey Hepburn story maybe.

She has music in her head again. Her flapper dress, the color of her mouth, passes from bright purple to orange and then back to pink as she lines up the bottles on the tables, congratulating herself on the limited amount of soft drinks, a good part of which she intends to transform into rum punch and pina colada very soon.

When the organization of the Christmas party came on the table, she volunteered to take care of the drinks, and nobody dared opposing her on such a touchy subject, especially since she forbade anyone to try and give her a hand. Thanks to that, they were not getting that lousy sangria and terrible daiquiris that had cost her some of her dignity and health at her first office party.

She is mixing coconut cream with rum in a large bowl when he hears someone behind her. Agent Cooper is standing alone, idle, in the middle of the room, a vision in a pristine tuxedo, hair even more groomed than usual and shiny under the projectors. Only his tie hangs loose uncharacteristically, but she has no time to wonder about that, for he is apparently taking her in, and Christ, so is she.

“You must be kidding me,” she eventually says, because somebody has to say something at that point. The sounds in the room are a bit muffled, but she can't tell if it is because of the balloons, all that music in her head, getting louder now, or Cooper's face, there, so unmistakably there.

He smiles evenly, giving her the slightest shrug:

“What are you talking about?”

“You know fairly well what I'm talking about, Special Agent Dale Cooper. This tux might be worth three months of my salary, or at least it looks like it does. Is that seriously what you are wearing to an office party? Are you going to show up every year, dressed like you are a spy?”

She observes as confusion turns into modest epiphany in his eyes, under a soft pink hue.

“Is that what you meant last time, about it no being the Sixties anymore?”

She closes her eyes a bit too forcefully, something she shouldn't do with so much glitter on her eyelids. There is no real point in trying to phrase it diplomatically.

“That, and the fact that you seem to know perfectly what works for you. I mean,” she cocks her head with a faraway expression, as if she could perfectly detach herself from the minute details of his appearance, “you must know what that brings to one's mind, what that tells people. This is a man who must sweep every girl off her feet. Somebody who drinks shaken Martinis on the rock and always carry a red rose with him, for the elegance, but also just in case.”

He steps closer and asks with a touch of incredulous curiosity:

“Are you mad at me?”

She only laughs quietly, looking at his unmade collar:

“Why haven't you tied your knot?” she asks, affection coating her words. “Don't tell me you don't know how to, you're pulling a perfect one everyday at work.”

“Yes, but believe it or not, that is the only one I know,” he says, comically embarrassed. “I wanted to ask if you knew some others. Desmond only laughed at me.”

She puts in an effort not to roll her eyes, and instead raises her brows in a matter-of-fact expression that tells the world nobody should ever expect anything of Special Agent Chet Desmond. Looking at Cooper now, it is kind of cruel. She takes a step closer and grabs the ends of his tie, lightly caressing the shiny fabric with her fingers.

“Which one do you want? Maybe not a Windsor for such an occasion, and that wouldn't suit you at all with that kind of tie; now you're in luck that I can fix virtually everything, from a Trinity to a Plattsburgh. Even a Cafe knot, which would only be too appropriate for you.”

She eyes from below at his awed face, secretly pleased:

“Diane, you really are a woman of the world. Where on earth did you learn all that?”

“I have friends in high places,” she comments with a sarcastic smile. “Now come, I think that, given your tie, a Victoria will be best suited.”

She takes to button up his collar, her fingers cold from the bottles, and he starts a little.

“Sorry,” she whispers against his neck.

While she works on the intricate knot, she can feel his eyes lowering on her, so much as she doesn't dare to move an eyelash. She tries to focus on the task at hand, but after a moment of silent he resumes talking.

“It seems to me that you of all people should know what comfort it can be to find a style that fits oneself and to stick to it rigorously, to control the signal it sends to others to take advantage of that image, in order to ease human relations, to create shortcuts and avoid explanations. But also to surprise.”

His voice is soft and she can feel the vibrations as her fingers brush against his neck to tie an end, the inflections warm and tensed as if he was enjoying some sort of harmless joke at her expense. “And in the end,” she hears more than she sees him smile, “maybe not so much the proverbial spy as the viewer of such movies. Now it occurs to me that liking them might still make me suspicious in your eyes, I'm unsure. But it's hard, you know, following your trend. Not all of us have the imagination.”

It is said with such modesty that she almost wants to comfort him, although there is something in his words that she cannot quite make sense of. She's tightening the knot into place, contemplating the result, when he adds:

“I guess I'm just looking for what feels right.”

She finally raises her eyes to meet his, lingers for the shortest moment, and simply whispers:

“Yes.”

***

A quarter of an hour later, and employees have flooded the room, so much that it reminds her of her prom night now. Her prom night was, admittedly, exhilarating, but for reasons she'd rather not see reproduced here, in a professional context. She wasn't the homecoming queen, of course, who would ever want to be that (Pam, she corrects herself, obviously, when she sees what she is wearing), but she had secretly come to an arrangement with the DJ, a very advanced guy, for him to play “Immigrant Song” by _accident_ soon after the crowning. She can still remember the face of the headmaster when the introductory, witch-like cries were heard inside the room. So much for bubble-gum pop.

Albert arrives in his usual working clothes. Cooper has asked her, shortly after she finished fixing his tie:

“Will you dance with Albert?”

Probably the most hilarious question of the day.

“Albert would only dance with me if the ground was on fire, Cooper.”

“Pity. Will you dance with me, then?”

She has looked at him over her shoulder, as she resumed mixing intoxicating cocktail bowls. “I don't see why not. Ask away when you feel like it. Although I have trouble picturing you shimmying in that outfit, to be honest.”

“I think I just let you shimmy for the both of us, and choose my song with care.”

She is left her with a pleasant sense of anticipation, she has to admit; she only hopes the person responsible for the music (she would have taken care of that too, but somehow the other secretaries had just looked at her and had ganged up to block her initiative. Those people really had an insane approach to music.) would prove reasonable. The place already looks like a candy box, consequently she fears the worst.

 

“If it isn't Lord Albert Rosenfield, looking all fine and dandy. Can I say in name of the Bureau that we appreciate all the effort you put into your looks? It's a ray of sun in a world of grim couture.”

Albert is giving a disgusted look to the room, and over him the pastel lights produce an odd effect, as if he were a black and white villain trapped inside a Disney movie.

“Look Barbarella, the only reason we have so many of these parties is because nobody has friends outside of work, so that's really social relations band-aid, no need to look so giddy about it.”

“I have tons of friends outside of work.”

“Yeah,” he smirks, “so I've heard.”

On another day, she might let it pass, but she is to give in to the festive spirit, after all, not mentioning it is her birthday, so she is entitled to all her quirks.

“Fuck you, Albert. And where have all your minions gone?”

To be insulted seems to improve his mood and he shrugs:

“They're on their way, but they had to clean up my cape and tidy my coffin first. Such a pity we don't have a Halloween party, think of all this saving of clothing, the accountants finally free to walk into the light and to breath the sweaty, thick air of a dancing room for the first time.”

She smiles and hands him a rum shot.

“I'd love to slander for hours on, but I've got to shimmy for two, honey, so off to work.”

***

A respectable number of dances later, the playlist is a bit too predictable for her, but on the whole, and despite a cruel lack of Brian Eno – not that she entertained any fragile illusion on the subject –, music is acceptable. She's not so much of a snob that she is above being the queen of “Dancing Queen” either.

Albert can disapproves all he wants, she is grateful for the parties. There is a certain want of dancing in everyday serious work and also, it feels like she is left with all that static electricity, in her hair, in her clothes, accumulated from her disturbing Gordon's days, something that gives her skin a strange itch and that she needs to shake off.

By some sort of divine decision, “Supernature”'s first bars are heard just when she is formulating the thought. Every jock and every vanilla girl on the dance-floor looks around in distress and disappointment retreats against the tables, while the few brave souls who can dance to something other than the Beach Boys initiate a collective trance.

This is a very elegant song to dance to in that setting. Someone has changed the lights pace, and the spots are flickering rapidly, all her jewelry is clinking in rhythm, her hair probably moving slightly out of sync, like a badly animated cartoon. She feels out of this world, a series of jump cuts emerging from the dark. In the midst of this strange experience of dissociation, she gets a glimpse of a pink Agent Cooper, looking at her from afar. A second later and it's a yellow agent Cooper, his expression unreadable. She blinks, and he's blue and much closer. That's a nice take, she thinks, as the song is ending and the number of her incarnations slows down with her heart beat. Exhausted, she lands nonchalantly against the buffet, next to a sardonic Albert.

“I've seen you slow-clapping me, you know.”

“Darling, under that light there's no telling if it was slow-clapping or enthusiastically hailing for you to keep your bob on.”

She's well-advanced in her pina colada when the multicolored Cooper approaches her.

“Can I request my dance? Although I'm not sure I'm up to the challenge, given your extraordinary skills.”

Ignoring Albert's less than discrete snort, she gives her hand in good grace. When their fingers touch, though, something buzzes and a small shock makes them both stand back. She could swear she saw a minuscule flash of white between their hands.

Albert rolls his eyes as if exasperated by symbolic heaviness.

“Oh come on, you must be kidding me.”

 

She has not been paying attention, the lights are very slow again, and she can tell what song this is. At least whoever it is at the turn table knows how to take advantage of an atmosphere. He puts his hand on her waist. He steps forward, she backs up. “Moon River” is enveloping them like a blanket of sound.

They never touched much before, except for her recent display of emotion. This feels almost impossible, after all the talking, all the tapes, each recording marking more the frontier between them. But when she raises her eyes from where their bodies are touching, a zone of interference, an oddity, he is smiling, and makes her sway when the song sways too. It is a very slow feeling, rising in her chest, an easing warmth. She melts a little in his arms, and wherever he's going, she's going his way. That's what the tapes are for, after all.

They dance a languid waltz of sorts, something very cinematic, him in his Bond tuxedo and her, a late incarnation of Mary Quant, a Swinging London bored icon. It must be the pina coladas, but after some time, she finds herself letting her head rest on his shoulder as if it were too heavy for her to carry alone. It's so light a touch, she's barely brushing against him, she wouldn't dare, never, it's just that her head is tilted, it's just that she bends toward the bright circles on the floor ever so slightly, and then she hears his voice in her ear, the same voice, the one she's been listening to all this time, with a modulation she treasures, the good kind of vibration, and the voice whispers:

“Happy birthday.”

 

This might be the ultimate meeting point between ear and mouth she has been fantasizing about all those days, this might be when they actually cross sound paths. It's Present Dale and Present Diane, if only for this moment. The dance will end and she will tease again on a trivial matter to dispel her uneasiness and hide her nerves, he will laugh with too much good humor, as if it is indeed funny and light, as if everything in life can be genuine and sane, and honest. They will ruin it no doubt, their future selves, but for now, if only for two words that mark repetition, every 365 days, they are both fully here and they are both clear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, that was a bit long, thanks if you're still with me. There might be many mistakes left out, don't hesitate to yell at me if something disturbs you.
> 
> Now, do you know “Rock Lobster”? It's a B-52's hit, and I love it so much. All of B-52's is enjoyable, but this one is particularly edgy, nonsensical and fun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDZy6-fMCw4 (the clip is exceptional, too).  
> Oh, what is that line, in the middle of the song, that transforms it into some kind of weird frenzy? Oh yes: “Let's rock!”
> 
> If you read between the lines of Jeffries's speech, the song he is talking about might very well be “China Girl”, Bowie's most tongue-in-cheek performance if you ask me, I mean look at this video, I've never seen something so awkward and insincere in my life : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_8IXx4tsus. So, “to tease”. Because, in the context of this story, a line like “I feel a-tragic like I'm Marlon Brando » sounds rather relevant, doesn't it? And also « It's in the whites of my eyes ». Maybe not so teasing after all.
> 
> “Supernature” is some strange disco hit by Cerrone with lyrics infused with distressing sci-fi themes, a very weird thing to dance to, but people did in the late 70's, so what do you know. It felt relevant somehow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgGK4qBTwpw 
> 
> And everybody knows “Moon River” from Breakfast at Tiffany, although I'm not sure which version they are dancing to. Let's be simple ans say it's the Henry Mancini's version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ8j-X1hq1I.


	5. Disguises (part 1): The Blind Woman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Diane struggles with the interrelation between body and mind. In which I keep introducing new characters because I'm in no way reasonable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter you'll find:  
> Something vulnerable.  
> Something French.  
> Something Monica Belluci.  
> Something Windom Earle.  
> Something worrying.  
> Something REASSURING.  
> Something in the flesh, and bones (aka shirtless Cooper, once again you can jump to that part, don't judge lest ye be judged).

 

After the Christmas party, she struggles to see straight again. Her retina has been imprinted with colors too bright, and everything comes circled with pastel halos for one or two days at least. She shouldn't give in to that nostalgic aesthetic so easily, she knows, and yet it is hard not to hum a tune that is both joyful and melancholic on her way to the office, but as far as she is concerned, she is entitled to be a Birthday Girl for at least a week, misplaced reminiscences of movies she has never seen or not.

No one should wonder at the fact that a birthday, culturally considered a chronological threshold, would bring you back to things of the past; it doesn't really matter if that past is a fantasy: in some ways, that is what past is made of, it cannot be avoided, a sandy and unfathomable stream of events we imagine happened, reworked images of disturbances that are but voids in the face of the present.

But as the days go by, her unease grows; it's Cooper's fault. The past, yes, let's talk about the past now: she listens to old tapes, one, two, six months old, and the feeling is the same, that overwhelming presence she doesn't know how to handle, so different from her daily experience of him, so different from when their knuckles brush over a shiny green apple, so different from when he says quietly, as she reads the lyrics to the song her last lover has written for her, “Is it any good?”.

There is only this voice that pierces through everything, and as much as she tries to mute it by listening to loud bands, putting the Slits to maximum volume when she is alone, she has trouble ignoring those reverberations.

She is stuck in between two phenomena she fails to understand, the intimate accents of Past Cooper's voice, aging so quickly she almost feels the need to protect him, to ensure the tapes will endure, won't be disposed of, for when she first listened he only was Two-Days-Ago Cooper and now… they are growing apart so fast, two cars on separated motorways, and she wants to swim upstream, to go into reverse.

She can only rewind him.

Every time she does, it's one more crack in the mirror. And then there are the images of Present Cooper, but they too project something aged, _something that has been played before_.

She doesn't know where the thought comes from, but as always in this configuration, she is tempted to blame Gordon.

 

His body, though. This is the real uncharted territory, the one place where there is no space for stories, but even then she is unsure. He was fully there when they danced, when they touched, all that is true. But in normal office life, she cannot bring herself to touch him deliberately; accidents. There are mere accidents.

She never was shy, and she reckons she has a relatively healthy relationship with her own body, healthy enough at least for a woman surrounded by men who appear to have made a hobby of judging her looks. Albert's take on this trend is but a parody that curiously brings some sort of relief, air in the pressure area that is supposed to be her personal space. Sometimes, it's sad, but seeing yourself as “a variation on the concept of clown”, as he poetically puts it one day when he had a fight with a senior agent too fixated on standard procedures for corpses' removals, helps relieving the pressure. You don't have to look good. She knows that, she ignores that most of the time, fuck them, fuck them all but these days she feels oddly... vulnerable.

 

Since he's back, Gordon only sends Cooper on short-term missions, no more than a few days, but she still gets her customary tapes, even more so than before it seems, as if he had more to tell, when really he's just expanding his on-going narrative with trivia and descriptions, giving his world more depth.

As he depicts the peculiar atmosphere of Philadelphia's grimmest suburbs, where she has never set foot, she binds herself in the meanderings of his voice; she's there, she's standing next to those broken down houses built out of corrugated iron sheets and old planks, those lonely caravans with fraying reddish curtains, and yet someone is pressing hands on her eyes, as if to surprise her, and she cannot see.

Listening to him, she is like those horses you have to blind with black blinkers for them to accept the ride and obey your commands, for them not get terrified. She cannot see a thing past his words, she cannot turns her head in that imaginary scenery: her eyes are sewn.

And there is nothing she can do about it, nothing those hands can touch. She is but this, just a secretary, and it is part of what she does to be left behind.

 

One month past her birthday and, this is not a state that is customary to her, that's why she perceives it so clearly, she is on the verge of unhappiness. This has never happened before.

 

***

 

She had to move back in from Gordon's office, and even if she is more confused than she used to be around Cooper, it obviously is a relief, for both of us. As he tells her, squeezing her hands in his odd, old-fashioned way:

“DIANE, YOU HAVE BEEN SPECTACULAR, BUT I HAD NO DOUBT THAT YOU WOULD BE,”

she reads in his face that whatever they were working on is not over. He seems satisfied, however, and benevolent like a grand-father whose baby has just figured out how to walk on its own.

“I'm glad I got to know you betters” she says, unable to decide if she should smile, and there is no denying that the Gordon standing before her is blatantly different from the one who burst into her office with a lipstick-covered note three months before. But maybe, and this strikes her suddenly as something important, not so different from the Gordon who hired her.

 

So naturally, she is rather curious about who he will hire next, now that she knows no one with an ounce of normality can take this job and survive it.

And then he chooses Isabelle.

She had asked herself before what it was exactly that Gordon was looking for in a secretary, but in the end she should have known better. She has not idea how, after a year and a half in the Bureau and three months surrounded by copies of Washington State pines, she still has not caught on the wind. Of course Gordon Cole dreamed secretary would have to be French.

**

She remembers the two or three times he has entertained her with hastily translated dialogs from the French New Wave, yelled at the top of his lungs, that only spoke of inconsequential things like classical music and How to Get the Girls. She loved him when he was ridiculous; it felt like bittersweet revenge. Once though, he had been particularly strange. They were smoking in front of the building, and he was going on and about that movie, apparently a LSD-influenced fairy-tale adaptation.

“AND THEN, THE PRINCE MEETS THAT TALKING ROSE IN THE WOODS.”

So there was a talking rose, too. Very well. Not a problem at all.

“AND SHE ASKS HIM IF HE'S BORED. THE LAD SAYS HE NEVER IS. HE SAYS: “HOW CAN YOU GET BORED IN A WORLD WHERE THERE IS SO MUCH TO DO, TO DISCOVER, TO UNDERSTAND.””

“A bit of a Boy Scout, then.”

“SHE ASKS IF HE'S LOOKING FOR LOVE, AND OF COURSE HE IS, JUST AS EVERYONE ELSE. AND SHE TELLS HIM: “THEN FOLLOWS THIS PATH. IT'S A MATTER OF TRUST.””

She hates it when he looks at her like someone who expects her to make groundbreaking interpretations out of the asinine things he keeps telling.

“And?” She blows out her cigarette smoke with that irritated hand gesture he likes so much. “Does he get the girl? This is what this is about, right?”

“YEAH, OF COURSE, ONCE SHE GETS RID OF THAT DONKEY SKIN SHE'S WEARING ALL THE TIME.”

“Oh, I see. It's one of those “trust the talking flower” kind of moral. Very traditional.”

The way she pictures it, he must have seen the thing in good company, with a sizable amount of Bordeaux. He gives her the face of the man who is utterly crushed by the heaviness of his task, but honestly, she thinks that, for a FBI Director, he has entirely too much free time.

**

It's a good thing she has no misplaced pride, because when she first catches sight of Isabelle, she is quite sure the silly man will not miss her a bit. You have to give that to Gordon, he doesn't hire sweet young things you can recklessly patronize. She has seen it with some agents, and also secretaries who didn't last in the office past their thirties, for reasons entirely too clear to her and apparently undecipherable for whoever is in charge of Human Resources in a place where you can also get a job based on your karaoke achievements and air-typing capability.

Not a sweet young thing, no. Isabelle is about Gordon's age, almost 40, she is tall, confident, the mother of two. And _stunning_ : bright dark hair, soft brown eyes, extravagant curves in burgundy pencil skirts. But, and this is the trickiest part, she has the kind of beauty that produces a soothing effect on the observer, something familiar and absolutely opposed to the iced models you can see reproduced everywhere on glazed paper. It's a miraculous balance, but it works to perfection: she is stunning, in a homy way.

When they are introduced, she probably makes a complete fool of herself. It is a sore defeat, for someone who prides herself in no being impressed by anyone, but there is no witness, and she will firmly deny that she indeed looked like a dead salmon the first time she spoke to Isabelle.

When he sees her walk back into the office that day, minutes after their introduction, Cooper opens his mouth, closes it, and blushes the deepest blush she's ever seen on him. It is quite becoming.

 

As sore as the humiliation is, it is nothing that Albert cannot top, a discovery that she finds extremely comforting and of no small amusement. When forced to interact with Isabelle, he becomes an empty robot: there is something in her that stifles the mere thought of insubordination, and leaves him completely disarmed, out of any sarcasm or the not-so-veiled insult he usually produces on an industrial scale.

Once she becomes conscious of this, she comes to great lengths to ensure he will have to work with her over forensics paperwork, something he hates with a vocal passion. She then invents a sorry excuse to get her free ticket to the Most Disturbing Spectacle Ever Seen. It's like starring at the heart of a hurricane. Isabelle keeps smiling and hands him a pen while Albert, white as a sheet and dead silent, is visibly developing a nervous tic in the eyelid.

“So? Is this love?” They are walking back to the labs together, not too fast because Albert doesn't look too steady on his feet. She probably has a death-wish but this is far too good to let go.

“Please, Velma. If I had to comment on every Gordon's whim, I would throw a late-show.”

They have barely reached the stairs when Isabelle walks past them, apparently on her way to have lunch in a place where sentences like “HAVE YOU SEEN MY SAMOSA? I HAD FILED IT UNDER “S” BUT ALL I CAN FIND IS AN OLD GLUE STICK” cannot not be heard, or only very faintly. She knows how this gets. Watching Gordon eat is like watching someone slowly taking his clothes off, eying you continually in the process. He really had much of the stripper in him, all things considered. She wondered if she would be able to tell him so one day; God, there was no margaritas allowed for her in his immediate proximity for the next four years, now that this thought had emerged.

Isabelle's heels bring her back to a safest layer of reality, because they make no sound at all on the ugly linoleum. It is as if she walks on air, not a care in the world, and certainly not working for the greatest lunatic under the 39th parallel.

“Isn't she too dreamy?” she asks Albert softly, craning her neck to see her taking the corner.

“Europe would do that to you,” he answers almost grimly.

**

You can always count on Cooper to get the facts right when everyone else is too confused to think straight. After a week or two, he declares solemnly, in the middle of his coffee break:

“Isabelle is the very incarnation of _zen_.”

She has nothing to say against that, even if they still have to have that Tibet conversation she keeps on postponing. Isabelle always speaks in an even voice, her patience seemingly infinite, and deals with every frustrated agent that had to listen to yelled instructions for twenty minutes with a smoothness that really forces admiration. So, someone serene, to work with Gordon. As to whom is she supposed to be to work with Cooper, she doesn't have a single clue.

**

One day, as she walks past the security office, she suddenly decides she is curious, and knocks.

“So, how is Isabelle fitting into the daily soap, then? I bet she's the talk of the town.”

Georg, who is alone today, sprawled over the console as if he might take a nap there and then, frowns and asks:

“Who?”

“You know, Cole's new secretary. The extraordinarily French one. You cannot have missed her, she must make such a slash on a screen.”

But he's shaking his head.

“Oh, so he hired someone after all? That's weird. I haven't noticed her at all.”

 

***

 

Windom Earle, she decides, is a British entomologist. Maybe it's the odd angle at which his head pops in the door's frame when he first looks into their office, maybe it's the flannel or the quite naive haircut, maybe it's his way of half-jokingly kiss her hand while introducing himself. In that gesture you can perceive the other half of the intention, the solidified belief that a world of rituals and ancient social symbols still exists somewhere and must be payed a tribute to. Every person she has met in the Bureau is old-fashioned in his own personal way, and Earle is no exception, although he seems to be the only one who is acting so deliberately that it makes you feel a part of a game of barons and earls.

That being said, Cooper was so ecstatic when he came back to the Bureau that she was in a way forced to like him. What bothers her a tad is that no one is able to tell her where he had been for all this time. They vaguely mutter of a mission, something long-term, but even then they seem uncertain. She tries Albert, who waves her off with a “That's classified”. It's not the first time she feels an amount of unease among her colleagues on this subject, some agents coming and going in the background without much intel reaching the lower levels, but so far she hasn't been able to make more of it.

Thus she is all ears, while pretending to type diligently, whenever Earle shows up in the room with a devilish smile and a wooden chessboard tucked under his armpit, but they mostly talk strategy, those two, queens and pawns, and soon it becomes achingly clear that she will never learn a thing about Windom Earle's activities, because the man is a genius.

Of course, and even if admitting it leaves a sour taste on her tongue, like those old peppermint they keep leaving on display in the lobby, there are in the Bureau some scathingly intelligent people, and not always in the places where you would have expected to find them.

Nothing compares to Windom Earle, though. Seeing him interact with Cooper helps her measure the world of difference between them. She never really thought about Cooper's intelligence, maybe because it was so obviously there and so evidently incorporated. His level of intuition and his thought patterns are probably unique, but they feel more like psychic powers than actual mind games. The man knows when she's tired, when she's plotting something, when she's thirsty (“Here, I have refilled the pitcher if you want”) and when she's playing music in her head (“You can put a record on, you know, as long as it's not one of those punk things”). She wants to beat him to a pulp for it sometimes (and he knows that, too, otherwise he wouldn't keep _smiling_ so fucking often), but his intelligence is of a very humane nature, supple and meandering, a trap for the innocent, decipherable foot.

 

But Earle. Earle's mind. Is like a spiderweb made out of steel, a roaring engine, calculating so fast you don't see it moving. Chess can lead you to think of it as a mathematical device, but this is a dangerous illusion, she learns from the way he keeps looking at Cooper, and sometimes at her, while waiting for his opponent to make his next move. He doesn't read bodies; he reads minds. People are the stuff his weaving is made of, a complex tapestry of cross stitches and counterpoints, where the dots are crucially entangled. She has never seen something quite like it. For once, she is faced with someone who utterly deserves to be a FBI agent; she's even surprised he's not something more, something infinitely more powerful. But curiously, he cannot be bothered to interact in a socially acceptable way, and that's probably what slowed down his carrier. Sometimes he downright ignores people; for example, she has seen him walk past Isabelle countless times as if she didn't exist at all. Windom Earle really lives on a different plane.

**

 

“Is something the matter, Agent Earle?”

He has been gazing at her for the last five minutes, while Cooper was surveying the board with extreme concentration, refusing to accept his customary defeat and glancing at her from time to time with a sympathetic smile that said “Seems like I'll never learn”. From what she can see of their table from her desk, his position is endangered, but a few valid options offer themselves, all hope isn't lost.

She'd never admit to playing chess when she was in University; it was a business for sad, lonely kids who needed the comfort of logic to forget they had no idea how to bring off a correct Madison. She had a secrete fondness for it nonetheless; and a Russian roommate, made quiet by prolonged exile, with whom she shared tea and ginger snaps over the checkered, simple patterns during long and cold autumns. There was the soft war. Sometimes a cinnamon biscuit brings forwards the knowledge, buried in the deeper layers of her mind, that her working for the FBI is the most bitterly ironic thing there is, with half her friends met in bars and cabarets, not quite fitting in the eyes of Good Old America. Foreigners, protesters, Blacks, probable communists, all of them witches up to a recent date, all of them potential targets for sickening inquiries. By now she's quite sure Gordon isn't involved in that sort of things; God only knows what he really does, but at least he doesn't seem to think their most threatening enemies are the packs that haunt alternative bars. Sometimes she worries over a cup of Russian Earl Grey. One way or another, she only drinks tea when she's in a very strange mood, and prone to contemplation.

 

Windom Earle is still starring at her starring at the board, and finally he deigns to answer.

“I look at you”, he says, “so that I can anticipate his next move.”

She frowns, Cooper freezes. Without looking at anyone, he hastily moves a tower forward. She watches him loose the game in two more moves, about the worst configuration he could have gotten. When his queen falls, he turns his head to meet her eyes, and there is something in it that spells incomprehension.

 

***

 

Something is off with Pam. That great, annoying, overenthusiastic glow is fading away a bit more every day, and she has all the trouble in the world putting her finger on why. Of course, there are the break-ups, the innumerable break-ups that really are a hard blow to Diane's otherwise legendary productivity: how many pity coffee can you have in one day, you ask. Many.

Pam has an astounding talent when it comes to choose about the worst agents to date, and she has a bit of a problem too when it comes to marriage. She had tried all sorts of strategies. Playing “Typical Girls” every day at Pam's usual visiting hour. Making heartfelt speeches about depressive housewives and self-value. Lending her some of her books. Hell, she even took her to a bar she likes one night, and now she's ashamed of stepping foot in it again because she has made her order a glass of strawberry milk. She is out of her wits. Bloody strawberry milk.

She never really asked her why she hadn't tried to date Cooper, she realizes one day Pam is wondering out loud who could fit her. She has no knowledge of his interests in that field whatsoever; the man could date Buddhist monks, for all she knows. It is a bit unfair, given that he works in an office that is filled with remnants of her various lovers. Sometimes they even feast on a free chocolate box. Maybe someday she'll understand why they all seem to think they have to give her so many things.

But Cooper and Pam? On paper, it works to perfection: the nice version of James Bond and the prom queen. But she cannot picture it. She cannot picture him with anyone, in fact, and she knows she is being naive: with those looks, he could have company every night. She tries, but only comes out with standard and faceless James Bond girls in long cocktail dresses, nothing too real. And she doesn't ask Pam why she has never considered the obvious choice, the one agent she has no doubt would treat her with respect and care if... but she doesn't ask, and Pam never says a word about it.

Remains the fact that, each day, she finds her more somber and anxious. All she talks about is failing, professionally and personally. She is terrified of forgetting about a memo, of being too slow on typing a report. It's like she is loosing to something, and Diane hates it despite her different layers of annoyance, but cannot name it.

 

***

Cooper has been out for three days on yet another local drug case when her phone rings. She shoots it a murderous look, and reluctantly pauses Past Cooper in the middle of a promising sentence that began with “Now I understand a lot of people get confused about the real nature of a Philly steak: is it an acceptable meal, or a greasy abomination? To which food group does it really belong? Should we get rid of the bread altogether? I may not have learned many things about Briscoe's intermediaries yet, but I did learn some facts from his favorite sandwich store, and my humble opinion on this much debated issue is that we...”

This better be important. Cooper's attention may wander from time to time, but there is a legitimate agreement among FBI inner circles that Philly steaks are an authentic mystery.

“Hello, Agent Cooper's office.”

If there a rule in this job, it's that she doesn't have to sound amiable on the phone. She doesn't have to sound amiable in real life either, but she feels a lot more pressure to at least try.

“DIANE!”

Fuck, fuck, fuck Gordon. She almost fell from her chair. The phone now held at a safe distance from her ear, she perceives disturbing background noises. Gordon must be away; he never calls her otherwise, the insufferable man loves nosing around in her office way too much to spare himself a short walk. She really doesn't want to know where those whooshing sounds come from.

“What is it, Gordon?”

“COOPER HAS BEEN SHOT, HE'S IN THE INFIRMARY RIGHT NOW. DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED EXACTLY, BUT I JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW THAT HE'S OKAY, SOMETHING VERY MINOR. ISABELLE TELLS ME IT'S BETTER TO REASSURE PEOPLE, OTHERWISE YOU'LL JUST GO BONKERS AND RUN IN CIRCLES ALL OVER THE PLACE LIKE CHICKENS. SO HERE IT IS: CONSIDER YOURSELF REASSURED. YOU CAN GO AND VISIT HIM IF YOU WANT, I THINK ALBERT IS ALREADY ON HIS WAY.”

She doesn't even answer; there is no answering that, and she doesn't have time to insult Gordon properly. The infirmary. Do they have an infirmary? Since when? Where the hell is that anyway? She refuses to loose herself again in those beige, subterranean corridors with the thought of a dying Cooper on her mind. Running around in circles, yes. She shoots through the corridor like a bullet, and Isabelle materializes in front of the stairs. She has no idea how the woman does it; it's probably those gorgeous silent heels.

“He's on the second basement, second corridor to the right and then to the left, look for a green door. He was wearing his bulletproof jacket, therefore it is only contusions” she says, as if commenting on the weather. Her voice is like a Tibetan gong to her nerves, but she gives her a dirty look nonetheless:

“Don't worry, I've already been properly reassured.”

“Thank you”, she reluctantly adds, before running down the stairs.

She knows she's successfully leaving the labyrinth of hell when she catches sight, not only of Albert, but of his entire team walking back to the labs in a straight line like toys soldiers. Detached toys soldiers with dark glasses. For all she can judge, they are probably flipping a coin in the boss's back to decide which one will have the honor of lighting his fire now.

Albert sounds like he's been rehearsing his lines in his head while waiting for her to arrive.

“The first thing he did was asking for coffee, it's basically like he was screaming your name.”

She had all this running time to calm down, but she's still very nervous, and spectacularly not in the mood for this. Fuck him if he doesn't want to see her vulnerable; he'll be her friend, she decided long ago, and it was time he meet that other Diane, the one who worried and went bonkers and yelled at everyone.

“How is he? Have you examined him?”

Albert gives her an eye-roll, but a soft one, acknowledging her distress indirectly not to embarrass her.

“Darling, I nurse the dead. It's probably best for him that I didn't. Anyway the dragon who's currently bandaging him wouldn't let me get anywhere near for reasons entirely mysterious to me, because, and I want you to bear false witness to this if things go awry, I've been a real dear. Even though those fake doctors make me want to punch sanity in the front teeth.”

She manages a smile: the only entities Albert will ever get to punch are the most ethereal ones, and particularly the ones you have no chance of finding around in their line of work. Curiously, that triggers something compassionate in him, for she feels, for the briefest moment, his touch on her arm, a light pressure that is devoid of irony.

“He's being himself through and through, that's why I had to flee, I just avoided a monolog on the virtues of meditation in the face physical pain... Anyway, nothing to brace yourself for; with his constitution, I'll say he'll be up and coming in a few days.”

**

When she enters the infirmary, Cooper is sitting on an elevated bed, naked. No, she corrects herself, or that other voice in her who is often wrong and corresponds, she suspects, to Future Diane, the version of her Cooper convokes whenever he says her name in a tape recorder. Not naked, he's just bare-chested, and he has excuses since a small doctor is on his knees, fixing a bandage along his right side.

Her anguish immediately turns into something more complex. She feels very cold, she realizes. Ice-cold, as if she was the one naked, standing in a snow storm. Is that because his body, so white under the white light, is reminiscent of everything mineral and polished, and looking precious, a supremely expensive work by a very careful hand? She has rarely seen muscles so finely drawn, long, on such a delicate frame.

And then, the collarbones. She cannot look away. They are very thin, a little prominent, like a trail for the finger to follow, to grab on the smooth border, with this treacherous depression at the center of the throat, against the vocal chords, where you could take the rhythm of the pulse before ascending the other half and finishing on a shoulder that presents many asperities if for some reason you were to trip, to glide away. She shivers; she wishes she had something to cover herself with.

Some time ago, was it when she saw him in that luxury tux, she vaguely remembers thinking that he was so stunning, and so not her type. But she was only fooling herself, let's be honest, let's be honest for once. He is her type, but her type usually doesn't come with that kind of smile and in that kind of clothes, so that is why it took her some time to acknowledge it. He's her type in disguise, which is probably the most dangerous type there is.

He raises his eyes from his wound and his face lights up when he sees her standing there, utterly flustered and useless. He calls her name, she believes, but at this point she's not entirely certain her perceptions are to be trusted. She tightens her fists.

“How comes,” she begins with an unsteady voice, “you were just enlightening me with your very educated opinion on Philly steak not five minutes ago, and now... I mean,” she tries to stop herself before she begins to loose focus, and inevitably it turns into bad comedy, “did they have that strong an opinion about it too?”

Cooper tries to chuckle but earns a disapproving look from the small doctor and winces in pain. She moves forward, only to freeze again when she gets close enough to see his actual pulse, beating in a vein of his arm that stands out because he is clenching the sheet. She opens her mouth to say something but closes it immediately, somewhat hypnotized, and looks at his dressing. There is only one minuscule point of blood tinting the middle of the large white patch, but suddenly her stomach feels colder than ever and she understands what is happening.

She blushes very rarely; what's more, she's a very slow blusher, and it can takes whole minutes before it creeps visibly over her face. Right now, it's probably still confined to her chest, and she's lucky she's wearing a turtleneck (Albert usually speaks to her in a French accent when she does, but once Isabelle overheard him and thought he was making fun of her, which led to the uncharacteristic sight of Albert spilling muttered excuses to his shoes while she laughed her head off). She has a bit of time.

“I wish you would have finished the tape before coming down,” he says apologetically. “It provides some context to this” he waves at his stomach and Christ, is he trying his hand at practical joking again? Is he not aware of his own body? The word “alabaster” keeps popping in her mind and she desperately tries to repel it in the name of proper language and not wanting her inner voice to sound like a Harlequin novel.

“Long story short, the cook read right through my interest for steak and reported me as suspicious to Briscoe associate, namely his wife, Briscoe's sister. I think she saw my recorder when I came back to have dinner, and when I showed up to their meeting, she just tried to shoot me in the back. I dodged it but it got to the flank. That was a really basic mistake, agent Earle will be disappointed in me.”

This is a lot for her to process. She has no time to react when he casually explains that after that, he had taken the woman hostage and ended up arresting the traffickers, taking them to custody before casually walking into the infirmary to have a quick look at that sting on his side. She cannot contain herself this time:

“Dale Bartholomew Cooper, if the bad guys don't do you in before, I swear I will end up killing you with my bare hands, and you have no idea how strong all that typing has made them.”

He smiles at her fondly before frowning:

“You know my middle name?”

“Of course I do,” she rolls her eyes. “That's my job to know these things, especially if I can joke about it, which, now that you mention it, I will. What were your parents thinking. Honestly, Cooper, I wish you were more careful. Gordon called me, and you know what that does to a person.”

She sighs and takes another look at his bandage, buying herself time when she knows she running out of it.

“How does it feel?” she asks very quietly, trying hard not to look at his collarbones again. “Being shot, I mean.”

“It wasn't a full shot, it only scratched the skin. But Diane, I will not lie to you, it feels like hell. It's not so much the actual pain than the thought someone in this world hates you so intensely that he or she wants to pierce your body and to destroy your coherence, to shut you up forever. Really, I can see now why Albert refuses to carry a gun.”  


She had no idea that he did, but that curiously makes perfect sense. Every time violence comes into the picture – and that time is always, maybe one day she'll finally acknowledge it – she is reminded that she doesn't understand this work at all. Dale Cooper, the most genuinely good person she knows, is the armed guard to a cause that is orchestrated by a fickle deaf man who likes penguin jokes and messing with her mind, for all she remembers. “Armed”. It shouldn't come to this. If they are doing good indeed, it shouldn't come to this. She is all for breaking noses when it has to be done, but this has nothing to do with it. God, she really should look for another job. But she's still absentmindedly counting the beats to Cooper's pulse, and she takes his contracted hand, gliding her thumb in his palm against the crumpled sheets.

“I do not know,” she starts with some difficulty, the words sticking in her throat, “anyone who's more loved than you are. You're so popular with everyone that I bet if you had given those bandits a few hours, they would have invited you out for tea. There's evil in the world but” she lets her fingers brush against the fabric of his dressing, so lightly he won't be able to feel it, “nothing that you cannot mend.”

That's a profession of faith. He's looking at her with some intensity, and inevitably her gaze drops to his chest a second before the doctor yells:

“Don't touch the bandage, for God's sake, how many times do I have to say this? Your team is a mess, agent. Let me finish my work, Miss, I'll release him in half an hour, but as I told him, he's not allowed any caffeine right now, too much stress already after that sorry business.”

“Of course” she smiles with a fake sweetness, and then winks at Cooper unrepentantly. “Look, I'll go and fetch you a double serving of pie at the cafeteria, now how does that sound for a bandage?”

Sometimes she desperately wants to be him; the man's just been shot, but give him a candy and a pat on the knee and he is up for literally anything from a long day of work to a zombie apocalypse.

“No sugar either!” she hears the doctor crying on her way out. Fuck diets, she's glad she's out because she's reaching her final point of combustion.

She cannot see herself right now, but she'd bet she is beet red, violently clashing with her own lipstick, and her palms are strangely itchy. At this rate, it's not so much a blush as an allergy. An allergy to what, she will purposely not ask.

Martha eyes her as if she is fallen from Mars. But there, they are supposedly green.

“What happened to you?”

“Can I have a glass of ice water? And a boiling cup of something. Oh, and two massive slices of pie, because Agent Cooper has been shot.”

It takes her a good ten minutes to clear up the confusion that ensues, blowing hot and cold on her own blush, burning her fingertips on both cups to chastise them once and for all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, here I am again with a giant chapter I had to split; I don't much like this one, I hope it has not bored you, the next one will be better.  
> And here comes something like a Monica Belluci cameo, I guess. It's an alternative universe, and as you know they tend to be quite porous in this fandom... Which reminds me that, in my mind, Pam really is an Amanda Seyfried character, an alternate Becky if you like. Could also be an Annie Blackburn, since I intend to erase her shamelessly.
> 
> I love the Slits, there are one of those feminist punk bands that sound so empowering. "Typical Girls" is one of their most famous songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyXGblps64M.  
> The movie that Gordon likes so much is Pean d'Âne, or Donkey Skin, by Jacques Demy. I love it to bits, it was shot in 1970 and has a fascinating aesthetics. It's quite well-known in France but I don't really know about the rest of the world. Check it out, it really is an interesting work (you'll fall in love with the Fairy Godmother, if you're like me). And the extract that is referred to can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7dNsxlDng4&t=460s.  
> (it's the only version I've found, with Spanish subtitles. You'll see the talking rose around 7.03 . It's a charming device, I find, hail to the 70s.) 
> 
> In the next chapter you'll find: an awful flirt; Steinian stutters; Caroline Earle, once; a Grimm story; snow globe tears; the bomb, baby; daisy freckles; a whole new color; A BUDDY PARTY; Caroline Earle, twice.


	6. Disguises (part 2): The Knight's Armour

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which it gets a little darker, and the name “Jeffries” is pronounced. In which accidents happen, even in the best of possible worlds, even on red carpet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This hardly deserves the name of part 2, but nonetheless in this chapter you'll find:  
> Something the best possible.  
> Something grammatical.  
> Something fleeting.  
> Something old and dark.  
> Something under waters.  
> Something nuclear.  
> Something green.  
> Something screened.  
> Something celebratory.

 

Her rash recedes; but the itch lingers, uninvited.

 

So she invents ways to distract herself. Out of a vague sense of guilt for lashing out at her that day, she forces herself to buy Isabelle a cappuccino. If the world made any sense at all, the woman would have the social agenda of a senator, but as it turns out, people prefer to stare from a distance, never approaching her, and she's actually grateful for the invitation.

Watching her blowing softly on the perfect foam that has formed in her cup, the way she gazes at her as if she had figured out everything she needed to know a long time ago, makes for an acceptable diversion.

The conversations are surprisingly comfortable. As they meet again she notices that it is probably the first time she isn't nervous about opening up to someone from the Bureau (bars are another matter entirely). So far she has been too busy juggling inconsistently between sass and legitimate anger to have completely honest talks. Except, sometimes, perhaps, with Cooper; but she probably mixes up memories of different tapes.

Occasionally Isabelle embarks upon strange speeches, delivered in a lulling voice, that she doesn't fully understand. She assumes it's the language gap, or the accent, without any certainty. Their exchanges often come out as distorted dialogs, full of inconsistencies. She finds that she doesn't really mind; it allows her to tell almost anything without worrying much about consequences. A truckload of Alberts wouldn't succeed in shocking Isabelle anyway.

“I understand why you are so angry” she hears her say, maybe two weeks after their first coffee, seemingly out of context. She was only asking how she was acclimating, which in her opinion shouldn't have earned her a full psychological assessment. Not that her temper hasn't brought her a certain degree of fame among her colleagues, but still.

The explanation given is anything if not confusing:

“Your mind is prepared for a picture that is too flawless, which means you can only perceive what departs from it. The gap is all you can see. Nevertheless, perfection isn't required to effectively alleviate evil.”

She frowns at the too obviously perfect woman who is currently telling her to forget about perfection.

“I'm sorry but… what the heck are you even talking about?”

“The FBI,” is the only answer she gets. Isabelle raises her cup to her as if in a toast.

“And believe me,” she adds, a stealthy conviction ingrained in her soft black eyes “regardless of it, this is the best of all possible worlds.”

 

She fails to see how anyone could be so sure of that, and even then, the idea that a world in which Harvey Milk has just been shot in his own office by a man who will most likely be out of prison before she dares dating another woman again, a world in which Pam punishes herself by cutting off meals every time she judges that she has been working too slowly, a world where there some people are willing to shoot Dale Cooper in the stomach, that such a world can be the best possible one, is making her want to rip reality apart.

“I used to be constantly angry, once upon a time. It passed. This too shall pass. Now I find myself much more… serene.”

There is no place for questions here, but she cannot contain herself.

“What happened?”

“Oh,” Isabelle shrugs lightly while taking a sip. “My husband died.”

 

At this exact moment, the necessity of sorting out the nature of Gordon's games manifests itself with violent clarity.

**

The next time they meet, she tries her luck, mostly in vain. The woman has a way to make her fail at being casual, something that is almost unprecedented (Cooper is quite good at that game too, but doesn't take advantage of his power).

“So what does Gordon have you do, exactly? Same as me?”

“You know,” Isabelle smiles. “The usual.”

She nods to indicates she got the joke, whatever that joke might be, and desperately searches for a subtle change of subject, finally blurting out the first thing that comes to her:

“I'm sorry, I have to ask: has he ever hit on you?”

Well, at least that is bad enough to cover up her traces, no doubt. She wonders where that came from; her mind is, apparently, less innocent than she would like to think. Such a Pam thing to say. Isabelle brushes it off, mildly amused.

“You listen too much. No, not Gordon. You know him: he's an awful flirt, but he does it with everyone he likes, even with Jeffries, and it's always respectful.”

She refrains from commenting, especially since she thinks in that particular instance, Gordon is being a bloody fool. In a different world, she might have tried something herself. But here, no. Out of the question. It is bad enough that she cannot bring herself to feel anything but comfort in Isabelle's presence, when logic demands that she'd be at least moderately scared of someone who speaks of her husband's passing like a spiritual enlightenment and who, on top of everything, may not even show on screens.

But as she observes Isabelle, now deep in thoughts, she cannot shake off the impression that, despite her dreamy presence, there are traces of isolation in her, not dissimilar to what she sometimes perceived, fleetingly, in Gordon's eyes. She looks like someone who has watched too many movies, yes. Maybe every movie there is.

It's curious – she really should be more careful, take more notes – the turns her mind takes these days. Two years ago, she wouldn't have expected such a comparison to make sense to her.

“Sometimes, he just looks so sad” Isabelle suddenly comments to the wall. “It breaks your heart. The way he stares at people, like he knows something terrible is going to happen to them, and his eyes, then... It's a hard job, you know.”

She wants to say, badly, that maybe she doesn't. And maybe that's also why she gets so angry after all. They all know. However, no one seems decided on telling her anything, so they can complain to the wind. She forgets to ask who “Jeffries” is.

***

There are other consequences to her little outburst in the wake of Cooper's injury. People seem to think they are entitled to talk now. Unfortunately, she always had a sharp ear.

She has been asked out by a reasonable number of Bureau employees, in the course of her first two years. Some of them morons, some of them acceptable, but she has refused them all in the name of work ethics; she doesn't want anything apart from lilies' petals all over the place. It is plain as day she would only have dated them for two or three months at best, and then, it's sometimes difficult to make people understand she needs her freedom. Besides, most of them are too old-school for her, too obviously boring. There are one or two girls she would smile to and dance for at Bureau parties, but she cannot find in her to take it further, not here, surrounded by backward alpha males.

So naturally, she should have expected the rumors, or at least the bloody stupid assumptions. One day when she is crossing the self she hears Mike, from Investigation Department, saying to another agent: “Nah, you just can't, she'll throw you out like garbage. I know she is, but it's Cooper's Diane, man.”

She walks straight to the table and slams a hand on it. In spite of everything, that is why she sticks to thick plastic and wood bracelets: they make a lot of noise, and a nice impression on a cheek if needed. She doesn't mind condescending looks, doesn't mind being cheap: it is her own American fist, and it is effective enough that the whole party shuts up.

“Gentlemen”, she says in a neutral tone. “It hasn't escape my notice that some traits of the English language might have been misguidedly used around here these days. What's in a possessive, right? Well, since you might need a little reminder, I will provide you with one; it's a good one, so pay attention. A correct use of the expression might be phrased “Diane's Diane”, as in “A grown, self-sufficient, sometimes susceptible to violence person, Diane's Diane's Diane through and through.” Now I know the syntax is all a bit confusing, a rose's a rose's a rose, am I right, so here's a simpler example: “Oh, are those Mike's intestines hanging around the ventilator's pals? I don't know, they might be Terry's, or Stu's. It's hard to tell with all that blood on the walls.” Much clearer now, I think. Thank you for your attention, and enjoy your lunch.”

You can't kill a rumor with fear, she knows. But there is no harm in trying.

***

 

The first time Caroline Earle crosses the room Cooper and her are both sitting in, it's during a celebration drink for the FBI 70th anniversary, and he is finally explaining to her the political history of Tibet, with such a passion that he doesn't even notice her. She does, fleetingly, from the corner of her eye; and then she's back to the Dalai Lama.

 

***

In March 1979, Cooper is sent on a case that is different from what he has been working on so far.

It begins surreptitiously. Gordon appears in their office more often than usual which, with Earle's customary visits, makes for a lot of traffic. She begins to notice a pattern; as if they split their time to share him, having seemingly innocent conversations, scheduling meetings sometimes. His agenda is growing fuller and fuller. She would have thought that after his accident on the Briscoe case, his carrier would have been slowed down a bit, but it seems to be the exact reverse. If that's FBI sense of cosmic justice, she might very well take on slacking off in her reports. If only she could. She hasn't it in her to be anything other that perfectly organized; that's the curse of the learned cabaret singer: she still likes things neat and parallel.

But then one day, Cole and Earle cross paths, and it's an interesting accident, really. Because suddenly, there is something in the air thick and electric, and maybe they weren't sharing after all.

She doesn't dare asking Cooper, who's always making a superb job of being friendly with everyone, but if it's a battle of influence, she isn't able to tell which balance they have achieved by sending him on the Roe kidnapping case.

 

It is a grim story. Actually – curse her playful brain, she needs to stop talking to Albert so much – it's almost a Grimm story. There is something dark and twisted in it that addresses the deepest layer of the psyche, basic fears, the bogeyman under the bed who will rise in the night and get you.

Chris Roe. That's the little girl who isn't in her bed anymore. Cooper tries to joke in his tapes, but she knows he's not being honest with her, trying to shield her from the horror of that one case, an eight-years old he isn't sure he will find alive.

He can lie to her all he wants, she still hears it in the background. It's not her first tape anymore, and she knows how to listen. Background sounds usually tell her everything she needs to know about a mission, what she will type in the report: this once it is but empty hangars and dripping pipes, so many dripping pipes behind Cooper's half-hearted words, and very soon the wind in tall, scrawny tress.

They are up in the woods. It's a tracking. It was bound to be a short inquiry, because time was always playing against them; be quick, the little girl was telling them, or I'll be sleeping for a hundred years. In a bed of thorns.

So is it good or bad that she can hear the leaves cracking and Cooper labored breathing as he runs through the forest, as he chases them like a lone wolf, recording, again and again, “I will find them, Diane. I will find them”?

The branches keep striking against his trench-coat, and the cold rain keeps pouring over him, a gray sky to somber dealings, making her fear a violent end. The last tapes are exhausting to listen to, she's stuck in her chair with a sick heart, pulse beating in her ears, the noise of the typewriter only adding to the cries of the trees and those of strange birds she cannot recognize. This isn't natural, she thinks, this isn't his natural territory. Something terrible is coming.

 

***

She has just received the last tape. Pressing the “Play” button is akin to make it happen, to make it real.

 

“I'm so sorry.”

 

It's the first time he doesn't begin by saying her name.

“I'm so, so sorry but I had to... he, he had an ax and I...”

A child, crying in the background. A lumberjack, hidden in the woods. She's safe. He found them. But it's not Cooper, speaking. It's another voice, the voice of someone else. It cannot be him.

“I'm sorry, I remember saying to you... I wasn't hateful. It came almost without thinking about it.”

It's when it dawns on her. He's crying. Cooper is crying. Her ears begin to buzz.

“It's even more terrible, when you think about it, but right now I find myself in the impossibility of doing so. I have called for help. I keep telling myself I was in my right, doing my job, serving... but, now there is only shame. I have seen what he has done, and yet... It still feels like murder. It felt like I wasn't there at all but it was my hand. My finger. I will get used to it.”

In the chaos of sounds, his poor attempt at sounding definitive is what makes her break apart.

“I don't want to get used to it. Maybe I shouldn't be, but I'm ashamed. It's like a dream, when you realize you have done all those terrible things, and then remembers it is but a dream, everything can be erased, corrected, it wasn't really you, only an image. I'm sorry, I shouldn't be telling you these things, I don't even make much sense but I need... I fear that you will look at me the way I look at myself now, not recognizing the man who told you all these things when he first met you because he was anxious to be accepted. I killed him. I shot him. And he's dead.”

This voice is so young, she reflects. She keeps forgetting he's not an ageless hero from the realm of fiction. He's 25, and he just killed someone for the first time. There is something very wrong with this sentence.

“But Chris, she's... “alright” is not the right word. He tied her to a tree. She was tied up to a tree when I found her. She asked... she asked if I was “the knight”. And then I heard something in my back, he was plunging on me and I shot him. She doesn't want to come near me now.”

The little girl's crying has not stopped, it has been the background of all that tape, and it keeps going, on and on, and in her mind the forest has turned into a room, hermetic, slowly filling up with the tears of a child.

 

She is crying too. She is still crying when Albert opens her door and, taking an uncomfortable look at her face, states:

“Fuck. So you know already.”

Her blue lagoon eyeliner must have run, making her tears look artificial, as if she had broken one of those snow globes where the water, passing off as sky, is always so brightly blue, over an idyllic landscape. Albert is distressed, she can tell, because he feels a sudden need to explain things.

“That's the problem with those damned tapes; Gordon sealed some sort of demonic deal with the obscure force that controls the postal service, and they always come back so quickly. He's adamant about it.”

She's still looking at him unblinkingly with her aliens tears streaking her face. So, clashing with all her expectations, he squats down in front of her as if to expose the basic facts of life to a child. He doesn't touch her, and she is grateful for it.

“Look,” he says.

“Those things happen. It's awful, it's gut-wrenching, and it makes me so mad that there are days I could tear the whole lab down. And yet I don't. There's a reason I'm a doctor, I won't give you the usual goody two-shoes bullshit about cosmic justice and us serving a greater cause. Sometimes you have to buy it so you can still do your job, but that's always an ethical defeat. You're not an agent, you don't need to believe it. There's no Hare Krishna cosmic balance that saves a flower child every time we send a bullet through a skull.”

“Nothing can justify a killing. Nothing. Remembering that something is unacceptable, well, I find it easier. But when this happens, it's not a balance, not a choice; more of a very sick bet. Heads or tails. Cooper or the other. You only get to keep one, whatever you do or believe is right.”

That's about the longest speech she ever extorted from him, and he passes a weary hand on his face, as if to brush away the tears that are not there.

“At the end of the day, the worse things about this job,” he continues “may not be the weirdest ones. It's the commonest ones. The plainest. There are days I crave for an impossibility.”

 

She doesn't say anything. Instead, she hugs him. He clearly didn't expect it and almost tumble, which somehow improves the embrace, for these things can never be too neat. So here she is, after all: spilling emotions all over the carpet. It's been two years now; she feels like she has earned it.

 

***

It reads in everyone's eyes: she is too affected by this. She saw it in Albert, the moment he looked at her face. She sees it in Gordon, when he tells her Cooper has been offered a leave of absence to process the event, and won't be coming back immediately. After three weeks she gets a postcard from the Caribbean. On it is a palm-tree that looks fake. He says he's mostly meditating, but the inner voice she gets by reading his neat handwriting differs from the tapes in a way that makes her nervous. Even Isabelle looks at her like she is a bomb ready to explode, and Martha goes as far as to bring her a cappuccino all the way to her office. Something is very wrong.

 

In fact it might not be just her. They are all extremely busy, all of a sudden, running from one office to the other, knocking on doors with urgency, and there's more hushed conversations in the corridors than ever before. She thinks she saw the woman named Lil rushing through the stairs one morning, in that same blue dress.

The whole Bureau seems on edge. The phones keep ringing, and when she finally gets a glimpse of Gordon, he looks twenty-five years older. The FBI is always two days ahead of any newspapers, so it's Desmond who, probably out of boredom, unexpectedly spills the beans.

“It's the bomb, baby.”

She really wants to break his nose right now, but she needs the information, so she soothes herself with mental sounds of crushed bones and gives him a pointed look.

“Alright, alright, I get it, Diane, don't crucify me. All I'm saying is that it might be the end of this atomic age, or the end for us altogether, so I hope you've said all your prayers like a good girl. Long story short: Three Mile Island.”

“Shit.”

He's leaning against the door as if it is nothing, but they both know. Three Mile Island is their black hole, an ominous place always lurking in the scenery, and she has heard the name pronounced from time to time ever since the day she was hired. It wasn't a constant worry, but it was always there, somehow. At first she had assumed it was a matter of national security, preventing any foreign intrusion in one of their major nuclear site; but slowly she came to understand they were guarding it in a whole different way. It was not what was outside. That had been the one piece of information she had grabbed through her Gordon months. Three Mile Island was an internal concern.

“How bad is it?”

Desmond seems to delight in being her only source of knowledge right now, and to this day that has been a configuration she has worked hard on avoiding, but this is an emergency.

“They haven't told you? I forgot you were basically a widow those days. Anyway,” he hastily continues, seeing that she's about to give him a well-deserved grammar lesson, “a leak in a reactor. Officially at least. Good Old Jimmy's going to have a look around, I heard. Earle was in the area so I guess we'll know more about that pretty soon. Three Mile Island. Well, that could explain a thing or two, if you know what I mean.”

How is this man even an agent? Is she suddenly above the “classified” level? Although, on reflection, she bloody deserves it, now that Gordon has decided he got to play with her mind and that the tapes seem to come from another dimension. Does she even want to ask them, though, those children with their lethal toys? An accident in Three Mile Island, and they could all burn. If it's an explanation to anything, it means that the situation is a rocketing disaster. Something has been breached.

 

***

 

Soon after that, she reaches the point where she cannot do it anymore. Cooper is not there and this is too much. Too many tapes, too many “Diane”, she is loosing herself and the mirror becomes a pool of anguish.

She's too entangled in this, she's all ears, she cannot see, she cannot touch, the frustration becoming unbearable, tugging at her body, tugging at her mind. She is splitting. She wants too much and it's simply not acceptable to be stranded in that passive island where events reach her two or three days after they happen in the real world. She needs some air, she needs to conquer some distance, to shield herself from the Cooper who cries over the recorder. Her position is unsustainable.

 

One night she brings home a box full of dyes and polish, put on Richard Hell's _Blank Generation_ and lines the bottles around her sink like a guard of honor to her sacrifice.

First she washes her face, the different colors tracing tiny streams on the white porcelain, a web of hair-thin tints. No body is ever natural. She never believed in that, no matter how loudly people tried to convince her, not since her and her friend Magda put daisy petals on their lashes and pressed the yellow, fluffy heart to their cheeks, hoping for golden freckles. She was seven, then. Cooper does squats against the wall when she least expects it, she's pretty sure Pam wears push-up bras, and Gordon keeps a comb in his belt, probably convinced no one notices it. Nothing has really changed.

She yearns for a different kind of flower now.

She has always been too guarded. That's the way she is, but there, despite some individual morons, she had found a place of her own, and a sufficient number of people that are willing to take her at face value, mostly because they are so peculiar themselves that she seems to represent a comfort for them. And at Cooper's contact, she melts, she melts a lot. She could let go.

But that's the whole point, isn't it: he is too warm, too friendly, too blatantly sincere every time he speaks, much too delighted to see her every day, there is something so honest in him, and the light in his eyes pierces her walls like acid, it almost hurts. When she is with him, she sometimes feels like an Egyptian mummy, so old and desiccated and kept from the light of day for centuries, so that if he so much as touches her she will blow up in a cloud of ashes.

And now that he is hurt, it's even worse; she cannot amount to what she should be to help him; all she can do is listen without talking back, and it's not enough.

So she erases herself. Her head bent into the sink, the bleach processing, she thinks about every hair breaking open and releasing its pigments, running away with tap water, and a weight lifts from her shoulders.

When she looks in the mirror again, her face is surrounded by a whitish cloud, a blank cutting over her normal, colored space, engulfing her, as if she was slowly being swallowed by the void. It's a negative aureole of sorts, but it's not here to stay. This is not self-destructive; it's a recreation. She needs a color that will detach her from her old self, a dissociation of atoms and a recombination. She needs protection.

 

At the end of the evening, her sink is shining a bright emerald green, and she is carefully applying pink, white and silver polish to her nails to the sound of slow jazz, something Duke Ellington which name she has forgotten. The night is mellow now; she breathes.

 

The lobby boy, “Jim” as he told her once, raises his head when she walks in and follows her with his eyes, unabashed, all her way to the stairs. Several agents twist their head as she climbs down the stairs. Someone who has no desire to live old lets out a low whistle, and Barrow audibly sneers when she crosses his path. Pam covers her mouth with her hand and laughs like a child confronted to a transgression so huge it elicits equal amounts of terror and admiration. She walks around her in circles, not daring to touch her hair, asking her if she's not afraid.

“Of what?”

Pam stays silent, eyes wide open, looking puzzled, and finally she answers:

“I... I don't know.”

***

She's sure that's not what Pam had meant but, when she comes through the office door a week later, something happens that should have scared her in advance.

She just hadn't thought about it. For once, she had only thought about herself. And it's true: she's proud, she feels better now, with her blazing green hair and purple lipstick. But here is a slightly tanned Cooper, sitting at his desk as if he was never gone, looking at her through the glass panel.

She can see his frozen face in that not completely transparent square, the horror in his eyes, and she realizes. She realizes what she is doing to him, what statement she is making. It's like the tapes, after all. It's a different Diane. Her mind goes blank. She turns around and flees.

 

She hides in the basement fake chapel all morning; when she comes back, he is nowhere to be seen.

**

Perhaps it's a different Cooper, too. She fears they have lost their easiness, not really getting reaccustomed to each other, and the room grows a lot quieter than ever before. Which is why she's glad Cooper is then officially appointed as Earle's partner (or, as Gordon keeps reminding everyone in his usual soft tones, his “buddy”. Gordon is really keen on what he calls the “buddy system”. From time to time, she wonders what has happened to his own buddy). He will have someone to talk to, someone who is not that green stranger, staring at him pensively through the panel all day long; that's what she does, in the hope he will finally accept to look at her and see for himself that she isn't some fallen incarnation of transcendental justice.

After a week of this treatment, it is time for a desperate action. Throwing all care to the wind, she walks to the glass panel and simply puts her hand on it, barely pressing. There she stands, like a visitor to the wax replica of the impossible agent, the gentlest man there is, a knight of old whose armor is rusting. He must be suffocating in this aquarium. Raise your head. Raise your head. When he finally does, a wave of guilt crashes in her stomach because of how drown he looks.

But she keeps her palm on the glass, presenting him with something bare, offering, she hopes, a way. It's anything but easy; she cannot afford to put herself in such danger so soon after her escape, and yet there is no real choice here. Cooper is facing her, entirely off, and slowly approaches the panel, apparently unsure if he has seen a light at the end of the tunnel, or if it only is glowing embers. His hand is over hers; she always had long fingers so they match with his almost perfectly, and they look at each other long and hard before her gaze drops at their superimposed palms.

This won't work. She can see it in his eyes, this was a mistake, this was the worse move she could have made, and the glass is cold against her hand. She has never seen him so sad.

Eventually, she tapes lightly against the panel, something random she hopes he will not interpret as Morse code, and mouths:

“Shouldn't we celebrate?”

***

 

They celebrate. With too much enthusiasm, in a depressingly beige, empty meeting room she has booked for the occasion. The whole thing is supposed to be a lunch party, with Earle and some of the agents belonging to his circle, which means thirty people or so and not, as Albert says, the merriest bunch of bastards there is.

Pam carries in baskets of pastries and the large wooden chess-board, a desperate smile painted on her face with painful care. The dark circles under her eyes almost match the black pieces of the game, she can see them under the makeup because she never believed in nature. Against all odds, as if to make amends, she has insisted on something healthy for once, and so there is no music, no alcohol, no swearing or at the very least, because how much self-critical can anyone manage to be, no _loud_ swearing. The sound of their feet is muffled by the thick carpet, she is incommensurately polite with everyone, and even manages not to cringe at Desmond's wink as he helps himself to the pitcher of tomato juice.

When Isabelle finally joins in, she finds them all standing stiffly against tables, heads stretched out, forming an irregular circle around the center of the attention, the ongoing chess game. She frowns, an expression that looks so new on her face it must have created additional muscles to exist:

“What is going on here exactly?”

“Oh, it's just that habit of theirs,” she says. “There was no way we were going to avoid a final confrontation to seal the deal.”

“Yeah, relax Marie-Antoinette.”

Albert is in a full mood because, while he brought homemade tortillas, he still has to be in the same room as Sam Stanley. It seems that in his secret life, Albert cooks a lot; she has never witnessed it but somehow, the thought of it is oddly comforting.

“I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that” says Isabelle with a serene smile, her accent making a huge comeback.

He grumbles something unintelligible in response, buying himself a countenance by having another glass of tomato juice, a drink you would normally have to force-feed him with a funnel.

“And you dare sipping that as if it's a bloody Bloody Mary, you sinner. I feel like I'm in a fucking plane,” he comments to her with a sidelong look.

At the moment, she is only trying hard not to watch the board. She doesn't want to take a step in its direction. Earle has been glancing at her earlier, she's almost certain, and now she is paralyzed.

 

There's something else, too. Minutes ago, as the players were silently focusing on their game, someone entered the room, very discretely, but it didn't escape her notice.

“Ah, God bless Caroline and her wine,” Albert said.

Subconsciously, she knows she is Earle's wife, that stuck for some reason. Probably because it's impossible to imagine them married: that's not what the wife of a British entomologist should look like. This is prejudice speaking, but she doesn't like when facts don't fit properly in her inner narrative.

As she is trying to figure out why she wouldn't let her imaginary Earle have such a beautiful wife, Caroline passes behind Cooper, and something flickers in her face. Something that, indistinctly, reminds her of Pam, who is currently twisting a little in her plastic chair.

Now that is an interesting equation.

Though her concern is real, she cannot help but wonder what are the possible stories at play here. Could Earle be having an affair with Pam? God no, this is entirely out of the question. Not that the FBI isn't fond of the old, oppressive cliché, but her entire body is revolting against the idea, and that includes her brain, too. Once again, it doesn't sound right, it doesn't fit.

So what is that thing, that seems to link Pam to Caroline so strongly they can barely look at each other, that they both move as if they were made of a glass that has thinned over the years like those old bottles you find abandoned on the beach?

 

She has no time to reflect further. Suddenly, Gordon Cole slams the door open with a joyful cry:

“HOLY SMOKE, IS THAT A BUDDY PARTY?”

Isabelle gives them an apologetic look; obviously there was no way to keep him out of it. Now they all have to look at Gordon eating his way through the buffet, but at least it's a shared suffering.

“I'm sure you regret your ridiculous no-alcohol policy now, don't you?” Albert says in her ear, but she's distracted. She wants to see what Caroline Earle saw before, so she trots to the table that is just behind Cooper's seat, under the pretense of refiling the bowls. At first sight, there is nothing extraordinary on display, just a plunging view on the game, exactly what she wanted to avoid.

They are well into it. Earle is playing weirdly, even by his own standards, but she is used to their style by now and after a few moves, she gets it. He's waiting for Cooper to loose pawns. He's taking all of them, one after the other, but what's more, he's forcing him to sacrifice them. To put them on the line for no other reason than to preserve his queen, a queen he will take eventually.

All of a sudden, although he was apparently so absorbed in the game only seconds before, his eyes shoot up to meet hers, and he smiles. She is a butterfly under his gaze. And she remembers.

 

“ _Agent Earle will be disappointed in me.”_

“ _I'm just failing at everything, it's like I can't even walk without tripping on my own foot.”_

 

Cooper, Pam. Afraid they would make the wrong move.

 

She watches Cooper lose from above his shoulder with a mute sense of anticipation. It's quite clear Windom isn't fishing for a horizontal working relation with his new buddy: anything other than complete mentoring is out of the question. She has her own strong opinion on fatherly figures, but if that is what Cooper needs, so be it.

While he stands and publicly admits his defeat, saying a few sincere words about collaboration, she finds herself bothered by his constant aptitude for positiveness. He probably has a gift for Earle hidden somewhere, a gift she hopes isn't an apple, or she will have to interfere. But his partner's eyes are already scanning the party for another challenger and, as if following a natural trajectory, they fall on the only man in the room who is loudly munching crackers instead of conversing with his fellow humans.

“Gordon? Would you do me the honor?” he says in a low voice, his eyes never leaving Cole's face.

And for a moment, he looks genuinely hopeful, his face lighted up as a kid who is waiting for his best friend to join him in his favorite games of all.

Gordon stays silent for a while, deliberately finishing whatever grounded gravel he's eating with the air of someone who is pondering an important decision. Eventually, he bends forwards and says:

“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT WINDOM, THERE'S NO HORROR IN THIS, I THINK YOU AND COOPER WILL WORK TOGETHER IN PERFECT SYNCH!”

The look Earle gives him in return continues to disturb her hours after the lunch is over.

She wants to go and congratulate Cooper, something she hasn't done yet because of all this awkwardness between them, but as she passes near him, Earle catches her wrist.

“Do you play?” he almost whispers. “It would be quite a challenge, to battle against an ever changing goddess of the Moon.”

It's not the first time people try clever antique puns with her name. But he's probably the only one who seems not only to fully master the reference, but to enjoy a secrete inward joke about it.

“I can't,” she lies. Anger is her usual reaction to uncalled for physical contacts; this once though, she only freezes.

He probably doesn't believe a word of it. Still, he lets go of her to bring his attention back to the board.

“Maybe we'll have to change the rules, then”, he states to himself.

 

When she reaches Cooper, he's already talking to Caroline Earle, and his expression gives her a pause. Apparently she's telling him something about a recent loss, about death, that she cannot quite hear, but in front of her Cooper's shoulders tense. Here come her hand on his arm, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, as if they hadn't said more than a few words to each other, and for a moment they just stay there, an expression of pain encrusted on their face, mirroring each other while the rest of the room, oblivious to them, buzzes with mild animation.

Desmond has sat in front of agent Earle with his customary ease, making a bit of a show, passing his hand through his hair while warning him that he uses some highly nonconformist moves and that he should prepare. If she were in her right mind, she would have had to admit his shameless self-confidence is brightening the room in a way that contrasts so strongly with the prior atmosphere. But she cannot observe anything of the kind; she's stuck. Alone, she's looking at them looking at each other, none of them moving an inch, on a square-meter of red carpeting in which time has stopped.

Something clenches in her chest. Suddenly she cannot breathe anymore. There are on the ground floor for once, so she rushes outside without looking at anyone.

There she burns down the asphyxia with a cigarette, drawing on it until oxygen is a concept utterly foreign to her body.

She tenses when she feels someone opening the door in her back and exiting the building too. To her surprise, a hand falls on her shoulder, giving her a light squeeze. It's Gordon. He says nothing but he looks utterly depressed, and she hands him her pack before he even has to ask. She doesn't ask what troubles him; you never know with Gordon, and you don't want to. It could be a cosmic matter as well as an unexpected shortage of imported Brie. So they just look into the spring afternoon, listening to a lonely dove that has nested in a pipe near the lab section. As a universal peace symbol, she heard the lab guys called her “Albert”. A long, silent mist slowly raises over their heads.

 

After a while, Gordon says:

“THESE THINGS CAN REALLY HURT YOU, YOU KNOW”. She jumps because she had forgotten, momentarily, who that was and how he talked, and then shrugs, lightening yet another cigarette between trembling fingers. Why is the idea coming back to her now, she couldn't tell.

“Gordon,” she asks slowly, still panting a bit. “What do you know about Isabelle's late husband?”

The director isn't looking at her, and for a moment she believes he didn't hear her. Finally, he answers in a normal tone, the equivalent to a whisper for him:

“I've heard he was a fireman.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Regardless of what I said last time, this chapter was a giant mess when I reread it. Sometimes my English just spirals down, and it took me so long to revamp it. I'm still not satisfied with the result but I cannot keep editing it for months.  
> I want to point out that I borrowed the whole “buddy system” expressions to babe_without_the_arms, whose fics I strongly recommend because they are perfect. I hope this isn't a problem (if it is I'll remove it, just shoot).  
> You'll notice I'm taking liberties with canon: Cooper's first kill happens during a bank attack. He does investigate the Chris Roe case though, and it seemed more… dramatic to make it happen on this one. It's probably wiser to see this as an AU already – especially because of OCs (and that Monica Belluci cameo that is going out of control).  
> As for references, “Blank Generation” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLlTnvepqQ4), by Richard Hell and the Voidoids (yes I know) is an interesting song, with relevant lyrics:  
> “I belong to the Blank Generation, and  
> I can take it or leave it each time  
> I belong to the _____ generation, but  
> I can take it or leave it each time”  
> Boy, the late 70s look depressing as hell. Especially thanks to the Three Mile Island accident (if you're from US you probably know about that but if you're not, note that I'm not making this up): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident.


	7. Inlands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which it gets more Lynchean, as Diane goes on a mission.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I'm back! Sorry about the delay; deadlines and festivities. This chapter may feel a bit different, because the story grew a bit of a plot—it needs to, since it's supposed to, you know, fix the end of season 2 (eventually. I will get to it, I promise, it'll just be a long ride).  
> Things are getting curiouser and curiouser, don't be afraid. Also, a bit more shippy than the previous chapter, so there is that. 
> 
> In this chapter you'll find:
> 
> Something noisy.  
> Something silent.  
> Something hermetic.  
> Something e-lec-tric.  
> Something URGENT.  
> Something narrow.  
> Something in the heart of the matter.  
> Something faint, and soft.  
> Something without a name.

 

“I've heard he was a fireman.”

 

That night, after avoided everyone at the office party, she writes in what has become her diary of all things strange in the Bureau, the blue notebook she keeps as hidden as she can in her cramp apartment:

“Gordon hears a lot of things.”

Then she turns back to the first page, where you can read, in capital letters: “I don't remember these events as clearly as I should”. Everything is there: the little red ridding hood tale, the flower dialog, the changing man on the surveillance screen and his visits, Isabelle potentially not appearing on camera. At first, she also tended to forget that she had the notebook at all – which is why it says so underneath the first sentence.

“Gordon hears a lot of things.” Ha. She doesn't understand why she put it like that; people don't mean anything by employing this expression. A simple phrase. Isabelle probably told him so at some point – in the middle of one or the other disturbing role-play session. And there it was. The problem. The real problem with Gordon, not the penguin one, not the innocent, rounded-faced, blue-eyed one, but the impression that occasionally, he used them – all of them, all of those who were included in his private sphere – like a ventriloquist.

She doesn't know what to do with this idea right now; something tells her that it is too early to form an opinion, that it isn't something she can judge in the same way she judges everything else: quickly, furiously, definitively.

Besides, another thought is disturbing her.

It is not Cooper, and not those words Caroline Earle said to him, words that she couldn't hear clearly. It is something more global, that she hadn't noticed before.

When she performed that scene with Gordon, about the “full flower of the evening”, she heard a radio in the background as she delivered her lines, and she could have sworn it was really there. When he told her that weird fairy-tale, she knew what the final question was, as if someone had whispered it in her ear. On occasions, her entire surrounding just cracked a bit, like static. And then there was the tapes; the tapes' background, little noises that somehow made her see the whole picture.

Slowly, she picks up her pen again and writes:

“What do _I_ hear?”

***

Her coffee breaks with Isabelle become a bit superficial; she has trouble perceiving the actual meaning of the other woman's words, fixated as she is on the ring that makes her voice so seductive and so alien, trying to figure it out. With Cooper still distant, and Pam a lot more quiet than she used to be, it feels like her days gradually grow silent.

***

It's getting warm again, so much in fact that she wishes every odd day they had a fan in the office. The concept of window is something the FBI has apparently trouble grasping; she is tempted to visit HR with a basic drawing explaining the square, transparent thing is supposed to open on a whole different space that provides fresh air and wind, or the local equivalent of it, which would probably be Philly's fumes and occasional tempests.

She understands that, with all the field work, agents may convince themselves that the outside world is nothing but a chaotic place, a landmine where everything, be it natural or unnatural, is there to get you. She has listened to enough tapes to relate. But there are times when she wishes she could shake off the feeling they live exclusively indoors. The Bureau is a tentacular building: she still discovers new corridors from time to time, as if the whole damned thing was slowly growing, making progress in its intestine war against everything exterior. On bad days, she tells herself the Russians are only an excuse, a contingent name they are now giving to a recurrent obsession, a sprawling fear that resulted in this sense of claustrophobia. But from what she could observe in Cooper's tapes, his assignments were slowly evolving from those exterior concerns (drug and arms trafficking, anything that broke through the State and national borders) to more mysterious ones. The reports were harder to write these days, the actual goal of the missions less and less clear. She has heard of Roswell, of course, and loves an UFO story as much as the next person, but, as she comments to Albert on a day she had to transcribe a case in which the principal suspect apparently disappeared into thin air, his footprints stopping dead in the middle of a muddy cul-de-sac, “if we take upon ourselves to wage war on everything outlandish, what we might get is an auto-immune reaction. I mean look at the people here. It's a lost cause if I ever saw one.”

She likes that theory quite well: the idea that the FBI will always fail, because the weirdest phenomena will always be confined inside those hermetic windows, below those innumerable corridors. She's probably the only one in here to fully appreciate and enjoy how self-destructive that configuration may be; but then again, she never truly liked a cop.

No wonder, with that kind of attitude, she hasn't been able to obtain that their only window would be made to open more than a few centimeters. Why maintenance refuses such a simple request when she gets a shinny glass-panel specifically, it seems, to watch Cooper eat his customary Friday pie, is beyond her. She needs some fresh air; she, for one, has always enjoy the outside world. Ultimately, it always seemed to her that, just as with Three-Mile Island, the real fear came from within.

 

**

It's May, already hot, and the room is filled with the heavy, heady scent of decaying lilacs, courtesy of the art teacher she's currently dating. The flowers are growing old already and she tries to keep her hands occupied, because concentrating on the smell is giving her the beginning of a headache. About that window, she decides. They shouldn't complain if she ends up breaking the glass one day.

She forgets to pay attention to the door.

No one has knocked, and yet he is there, looking at her with his usual curiosity.

The hair is different. Her brain trips. Again. Different.

He has that brush cut she saw for the first time on a surveillance screen with the security team, but it's bright red now. His clothes are much more extravagant too, a colorful striped suit she might have worn herself, if she wasn't working for the FBI – no matter what Albert may think, she actually restrains herself sometimes in the fashion area.

She tries to remember if Gordon ever told her anything about this situation, about this man, in the end. This isn't very clear. But she gathers her fragile memories, trying to find a solution to this puzzle, and concludes she hasn't done so bad last time.

“You're a different one, aren't you?” she tries. She is not as unprepared as she then was. Still, she hasn't got a clue of what is going on, but at least she's learning a method.

He raises his hands as if in defense.

“There's nothing I can do. Show me the way to the next little girl, and then we'll talk.” His voice is the same, it's a comfort. He nods at her green hair appreciatively, touching his own: “Are you trying it too? That slope can be slippery sister, I swear.”

“Yeah, cosmetics have always been a dangerous business, sir. I know that more than anybody. Are you here to see Cooper?”

Of course he always appears when there is not the slightest chance that Cooper will show up and interrupt whatever is going on.

“Always,” the stranger whispers, but then winks at her. “But it seems my timing is always so wrong. Also, I've brought you something. I figured you might like it.”

He takes a record from behind his back with a flourish, as if the tone of this encounter was something akin to surprise birthday and candid cameras. She looks incredulously as he turns his back to her to put it on, commenting over the first hypnotic notes:

“"The Electrician", Walker Brothers. I listen to it when I get too lost.”

She wishes she could see his face now. But then he turns around like a rock dancer, drawing a lighting bolt on his face with his finger.

“ _Electricity_. They exaggerate it, you know; like most things in life, it is neither black nor white. But Gordon just loves to be dramatic.”

Suddenly he bends over her desk, leaned on his forearms and neck stretched out like a snake, to ask:

“You like him, don't you? He's so _likeable_.”

There's something like spite in that last word, and also resentment, but that's not the whole story, she can tell.

“But let's pretend we all need ground control, for a minute.”

The need to tell him to fuck off is slowly increasing, and she shoots a warning look, the one she uses to get rid of the most cumbersome agents. A bit unorthodox, maybe, but that may be the only way to stay sane and deflate his “is-that-your-card” attitude. Honestly, she doesn't care if he can magically disappear or anything, he just doesn't have to be so fucking smug about it.

“I am such a people person,” she says with a sickeningly sweet smile, and he just bursts into laughter.

“God, this one is even more bitter than the last. Less than two years in, be careful or you gonna run yourself thin.”

The song is reaching its peak and he's swaying in front of her in the most otherworldly way she has ever seen.

“Never let them tell you you're not allowed to dance to the same old songs. This is the stupidest thing. You have a right to dance; there is no crime in it. Keep the pace, sister. Nobody is entitled to make you still.”

Impossible as it seems, she thinks that she nods. There's a ring of truth to that advice, a much larger implication. She will not challenge him over this though; his rebellious spirit, seems quite different from her own.

By the time the song ends, he's not there anymore.

 

***

When Isabelle tells her over the phone that Gordon has work for her, her stomach clenches, a reaction she never expected to have. There is no reason to be scared, she tells herself on her way to the office. Be angry, if you need to be, angry is alright. She has no use for fear.

The first thing she hears coming in is a melodious, derisive voice. Her ears begin to ring as she is overwhelmed by a need to run away.

“Ah, the moon of Alabama! At last.”

He is lazily seating on Gordon's desk as if he belongs there, the changing man, the electric man, and for once his hair looks surprisingly normal, a simple side-parting, like someone who is determined to behave. His posture, however, is still not that of a regular human being; he is alternately too tensed and too relaxed, and as he straightens up to face her, a voice in the back of her mind tells her his gestures don't add up.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean, Gordon?”

She expected him to ignore her as usual, acting as if everything was utterly fine and the alien in the room a life-long friendly neighbor who happened to have minor behavior issues, nothing too serious, a good comrade always ready to pop up with a record under his arm for a cup of Good Morning America, but he actually seems surprised. He frowns at her, the perfect picture of confusion, but then she knows he always looked confused to a certain degree, and she's not falling for that.

“PHILLIP, I THOUGHT YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO TELL HER!”

“Yes well you know what,” the changing man answers, somewhat in anger, stepping down from the desk, “maybe it's not my job to do so. Maybe, just maybe I don't have _the time_ to do these things, or maybe your orders never came by the right channel. But as far as I recall, Chief,” he sniggers at Gordon, whose unimpressed face reminds her of her own carefully manufactured one, the one she used for her job interview, “she worked for _you_.”

She swears that Gordon actually glances at his shoes for a second before facing her.

“DIANE, MEET SPECIAL AGENT PHILLIP JEFFRIES, HEAD OF THE BLUE ROSE TASK FORCE.”

She is quite convinced she has missed a step at some point in the fucking nightmare of an Escher staircase that is following Gordon's plans from a reasonable distance.

“I'd say we've met already,” she tells the changing man, “but I'm honestly not sure, and even then, that was an awful experience through and through.”

“That's the spirit,” he replies, smiling at the ceiling as if he was asking for more blows.

“I'M AFRAID WE HAVE A BIT OF AN EMERGENCY HERE. WE'RE GONNA HAVE TO TAKE YOU ON A MISSION, DEPUTIZED BUSINESS OF SORTS IF YOU FOLLOW. DON'T WORRY, IT DOESN'T INVOLVE ANYTHING THAT'S TOO DIFFERENT FROM YOUR ACTUAL JOB. I'M SORRY DIANE, BUT ALBERT IS BUSY ON AN IMPORTANT AUTOPSY AND HE SUGGESTED WE TAKE YOU INSTEAD. WE'LL TELL YOU ALL ABOUT IT IN THE CAR.”

She incredulously laughs, ignoring his rushed instructions, a poor tactic for making her comply without too much resistance, well ha, the ridiculous fool has forgotten who exactly it was that he had hired. She has seen him do this before, for God's sake, heard him pretend things were code, that a problem had came up, something explosive of course, that Washington was calling, that the president's pants were on fire, anything to get vindictive people out of his perfectly styled hair. It was something she had came to understand, and she probably noticed it only because in that respect he formed such a contrast with her that it fueled her ongoing theory as to why he had, indeed, hired her in the first place: Gordon hated confrontation. Most people were unable to see past the yelling, and to actually listen to him right. In reality, he certainly wasn't yelling _at_ you, and from his perspective he wasn't yelling at all, never. As someone who enjoyed a properly executed yell from time to time, she knew the ring of it. Gordon was loud but, contrary to popular belief, he wasn't feisty. Hell, she even loved that about him, it made her act warmer when she realized it in the first place, marveling at the fact that this branch of the Bureau was secretly run by a private, quiet man whom nobody would ever acknowledge for what he really was because appearances were so against him that he couldn't be heard.

“He's an old flower child,” Isabelle lamented sometimes while she rolled her eyes at her, reminding her he was something like America's Head Cop. “He's so open minded there are times I fear his head will fall off.” She had laughed so hard at that one: Isabelle was full of surprise too, and she had looked so utterly convinced her boss was exposed to a real danger Diane was forced for a second to consider the eventuality that she wasn't joking at all. But there was no way around it; joke or not, if he didn't explain himself better than this, there was a good chance heads would eventually roll.

 

“I'm not moving a fucking inch until you tell me exactly what you want me to do, how it has all of a sudden become my job to follow you in the field, and...”

Truth to be told, she has no idea how to address the whole “Phillip Jeffries” matter. She ends up waving an annoyed hand in his general direction, a gesture that brings back memories of Cooper at that first office party. She feels a pang of nostalgia hitting her by surprise as Gordon opens his mouth, only to be cut off by Jeffries, who suddenly sounds all business:

“Look, Evans, I get that you're pissed. I get it, we get it, the whole Bureau probably got it by now—there wasn't even a need to voice it, it's a very expressive face you have. But at the moment, we really need this job to be done and, go figure, not everybody in here can do it. You can. You've been exposed to Blue Rose before, mainly you've been exposed to _me_ , which has to be enough. As it is, you know already twice as much as some agents, whether you like it or not. Chances are, we'll get Cooper to do some more work for us in the, ah, “foreseeable future”, is that it? so you'll stumble across it eventually. This is urgent, and you're already halfway trained. Gordon will explain what he can afterward,” he pauses for the briefest moment, and gives his boss the most unsettling look, as if he was daring him not to do so.

“Anyway, there is no difference in nature between this task and what you usually do for the Bureau, so it's not actually that exotic. To put it short: an emergency, Cooper is waiting for us in the car as we speak, and you'll get the details on the way so, are you coming or not?”

Evans. It's the first time someone calls her that, here, and she cannot prevent herself from savoring it, taking a second to marvel at how aggrandizing it feels to finally win a last name. The bloody bastard knows what he's doing.

“Alright, fine, I'll come. But,” she adds, her voice still low and threatening as she points a warning finger at Jeffries's chest, “there is no way I'm going to trust you.”

She expected a lot of things, but not for him so stop in his track, already on his way to leave, and to stare back at her dead in the eyes, growing even more serious:

“Yes. Don't. Don't ever do that.”

 

***

Needless to say this is a weird car ride. She's stuck in the backseat between Cooper, who doesn't appear to have wrapped his head around the fact that she was here, nor to understand the reason for their presence much more than she does, and Gordon, who, since he's been in the same perimeter as Phillip Jeffries, is giving off an entirely new vibe. On edge, yes, maybe, he seems on edge. His whole body is tensed in a way she has never witnessed before, a fact almost eclipsed by Cooper's long-lost nearness against her side. You would expect FBI cars to be spacious, but backseats are narrow almost by definition, and none of them is small. She is not responsible for the shoulder that insistently presses against his.

Jeffries has given her a thick notepad and a pen, turning in his seat to explain hurriedly:

“We're going to a place where we need to record as much as we can: sounds, words, everything. This is crucial. But recorders won't work properly there, too much interference, and what's more this is a situation where we couldn't risk asking Washington for the proper authorization. So, I cannot stress this enough, they cannot know what we are doing. Now Evans, you're a good listener. And you're outspoken, if I recall correctly. Once we're in there, everything you hear, no matter how faint or loud, you write down. Everything. And if someone does so much as frowning at you, you give them hell, you tear them to pieces, because nobody must actually see what you are taking notes about. We will all try to keep quiet as we go. Reminder that this includes you, Gordon.”

Next to her, Gordon jumps, snapping out of whatever he was loosing himself in while starring at the yellow marks on the road, but doesn't say anything. In fact, they all fall into an uncomfortable silence, her perception of the restricted space becoming gradually more pressing as Cooper has yet to say a word.

“Okay, guess I lose: where the hell are we going? Am I supposed to know?”

Jeffries is looking straight ahead at a cloud that is, she will realize later, too thick to be natural.

“We're almost there, so I'll let you see for yourself.”

There is a logic to this, somewhere, there must be, she thinks as the round shapes of the Limerick power plant greet them with their false air of innocence.

 

**

A very nervous Professor Woodhard welcomes them in the entrance, giving her the most suspicious look she's seen since she passed the accounting department with her new hair color and a peach camisole on. Apparently, this is a surprise control tour; the man is so on edge, the words “Three Mile Island” so clearly imprinted in his mind, that he forgets to ask what they might want to check that could be federal business. This is when the reason for Cooper's presence becomes clear: he immediately fires off precise questions that make it sounds as if he had taken in the complete works of Marie Curie on his way there. And of course he would be able to pass as a nuke expert, she hasn't forgotten about the asthmatic kid who dreamed of actual rocket science on lonely, starless nights. Incidentally, she even has a dormant file of sorts on the subject, somewhere in a drawer: bits of childhood stories she edited carefully off the official reports but wanted to keep safe, to archive. She doesn't know why, but a strange sense of duty compels her to patiently recompose the puzzle that is his past, as if there was a way to account for his uniqueness and for the strange fact that she's almost certain she is the only one to hear those things.

The corridors are circular, treacherous, the ground and walls covered in a white plastic that makes them glow blindingly, and silent, so deeply silent beneath Woodhard's educated bullshit about their supremely efficient security system that she begins to fear her first official mission, shady as it is, will amount to nothing. But soon they cross the paths of employees, and the whispers begin. Whispers about the new intruders, of course, and she cannot blame them because she is, admittedly, an eye-sore (in Albert's words) but also because Jeffries, who was so focused in the car, seems to have lost interest the minute they entered the station, and looks as if his mind has decided to leave his body. Gordon is holding his hand with a worried look, the whole gesture obviously not new to him. She doesn't know much about Blue Rose, but it clearly implies being too weird to do whatever they were doing discretely.

Nevertheless, she dutifully notes down surprised exclamations and derogatory comments, until a different kind of whisper begin to detach from the background of gossips and complains. They are just words, but they have a special quality of echo to them, and she is unable to pinpoint their exact origin, but though they are fainter than the rest, they stand out. She writes frantically, afraid to lose them, concentrating hard not to wonder about their meaning: it is obviously what they have come to find, and there is a part of her that wants to be brilliant at this job, because...

“I'm sorry Miss, but are you writing this down? Because I have seen no authorization, and we have been fully warned that we should not...”

She cuts him immediately.

“I think the word you are looking for, Professor, is “Agent”. And no, I'm not taking your fascinating speech down, as tempting as it sounds. In case you haven't noticed, we're not exactly on a leisure trip, and this,” she waves the pad in front of his outraged face, too quickly for him to actually read anything, “is the report we have to submit about your colleagues from Susquehanna. It is urgent, and I'm not counting their blessings in it, so I suggest that you do not distract me from this task, otherwise your report will have to be a lot more elaborate that it is currently going to be. Am I clear?”

Woodhard mutters something apologetically while she catches a look of mirth from Cooper above his shoulder. As they approach what their host calls “the heart of the matter, not that there is any matter at hand, ha, you see, but of course our engineers don't have much to distract themselves, so I guess we should expect, well, I don't mean to say they're not focused on their task, don't get me wrong but it gets a little quiet once you've passed those airlocks...”, they begin to catch sight of different employees. Those ones are wearing black suits and helmets, looking like burnt astronauts, and walk slowly through heavy doors: these are the scientists who attend to the reactors, they are told. The pace of the whispered words quickens. They sound more familiar now. So familiar that…

 

_the full flower of the evening_

 

She stops dead in her track, just before a small door on the side of a wall. Simultaneously, Jeffries points a trembling finger at it, forcing Gordon to turn back.

“There,” he says determinedly. “It is there.”

“The ventilation room? Oh I'm afraid there is not much to see here,” Woodhard comments. “Necessary to cool the reactor off, of course, but the fans are perfectly functional. I don't...”

“STAY HERE,” Gordon interrupts. “WE ARE GOING IN THERE AND YOU CANNOT FOLLOW.”

“But...”

“THIS IS A DIRECT ORDER, DON'T MAKE ME REPEAT IT. SHUT THE DOOR BEHIND US AND WAIT. THIS WON'T TAKE LONG.”

The Professor is about to retort but Jeffries pushes the door open, escaping Gordon's grip, and they all rush in after him, conscious that something isn't quite right.

 

The room is dark, and so huge she isn't certain she can see the wall at the other end of it. Probably because the lights are flickering, along the circular movements of giant ceiling fans, whose blades are big enough that they look like those of a plane. The noise is deafening, dull but so powerful it seems to suck up every other sound, as round and round the blades go, alternating between shadow and light, shadow and light, and behind her she feels Jeffries is becoming agitated, waving his arms at something invisible in the air. Sight isn't what matters here for her. Over the whooshing blades, the words are loud, so loud she struggles to write, as they invade her head, filling her skull, shooting, crying, more and more, together at once,

 

_when this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out_

_the possibility that love isn't enough_

_Who do you think that is there_

_my log saw something that night_

_the happy generations_

_the one with the blinking light runs silent                                                 Tell Harry... I did not cry  _

_Two men apiece and we don't know what to do with any of the four of them._

_Rocks and bottles_

_It's easier talking into the record. I guess I feel I can say anything. All my secrets. The naked ones._

_All my secrets. The naked ones._

_The naked ones._

_Waking but silent_

_It's easier talking into the record_

_It's easier_

_A strange and difficult one                                             He wears a smile. Everybody run !_

_But there is still the question : why ?_

_Why               why                    Why                   why                                                 why_

_Write it in your diary._

                                                                                                                                _And the angel's wouldn't help you. Because they've all gone away._

_                                               This kind of fire _

_faster and faster_

The lights are blinking too fast, her head hurts, she cannot see, she hears Jeffries yell, terrified, crying:

“Ashes! Raining ashes! They are coming now, Gordon, they are coming! To burn. They want something to burn! They... got a light. A light. Got a light. A light.”

It seems like Gordon and Cooper are physically struggling with him, manhandling him to the ground as if he would fly off, and in a fugitive flash of light she sees him, pointing madly at the ceiling, face transfigured, hair wild, up in the air as if animated by static.

“FOR THE LOVE OF, PHILLIP, CONCENTRATE! YOU'RE TOO FAR BACK! THIS WILL NOT DO!”

There is this taste in her mouth, she hasn't felt it since his last visit; she wants to throw up but she has to write, to write the thing that keeps repeating now, again and again, again, she writes it, writes it until her pencil makes a hole through the page, falling on her knees, crying too now, she cannot see, she cannot see, she cannot see, and suddenly Cooper's arms are around her and everything stops.

The words, the noises, the screams, the whooshing, all of that disappear. Three notes of music come out of the fans, slow and deep. They echo in the silence. And then it is gone.

She cannot hear at all.

Remains only her open pad, on the floor, and the same black, scribbled letters, ten, twenty, thirty times:

_Wrapped in pain. Wrapped in pain._

_**_

When she comes to, they are standing outside the station, Cooper  holding her shoulders and pressing his hands against her frame, as if to shake her back to life. His face is all she can perceive  at  first, surrounded by a white halo. She knows he is saying her name because she has learned the shape of his lips when he does, imagine s it every time she begins a tape, the way they part at the beginning, his lower lip  letting the second syllable stretch just a bit too long. It is like watching a muted television: she cannot hear a thing. 

She has never experienced such a quality of silence, if silence is still the right word for it, and it occurred to her that she might be deaf. She looks at him with eyes that are probably way too soft,  not able to remember the last time she heard him cal l her like that, it's been three months now and he keeps avoiding her, avoiding her gaze, but  his expression just now is  the one t he old Cooper would have if she was... what? Is she hurt? 

Her vision is less blurry now, the scope enlargin g. From behind Cooper's shoulder,  she thinks she catches a glimpse of Gordon and he… it is possible that he has shoved Jeffries against the car, and is kissing him with , maybe passion? or  coercion ? God, she used to be sharper than that but right now… He sure looks desperate . Does that make sense at all?  s he asks herself before remembering where she is. Even her inner voice, that angry, emotional  presence, comes out fainter in her own head. 

Cooper's hands are  on her waist; she smiles at his panicked expression, lazily, and cups his jaw as he keeps moving it, trying to communicate something that seems important, something that he is repeating, she can see that, repeating and...

re you with me

“Diane are you with me? I'm here, I... Diane, please. Please answer me.”

She blinks and immediately hisses in pain, her ears ringing  so strongly that she loses her balance, crashing against Cooper, whispering:

“Wrapped in pain.”

“What? What did you say?”

She opens her eyes again, the familiar noises of their natural surrounding coming back in waves: the wind, cars on the distant highway,  the sound of an argument, and when she looks up, Jeffries and Cole are three good feet a way from each other, an undecipherable  expression on their faces. 

“Look, his hair is soft again,” she mutters in Cooper's ear. 

“Diane?”

The poor man seems about as lost as when she told him in jest she was considering getting a mohawk, “to go with the tide”. Sometimes she feels guilty at how she may impact his productivity; he's so easily distracted. Chances are, she's in that tiny time gap between “completely out” and “utterly panicked”, no fully realizing yet, so why the hell not making the most of it. She smiles at him again, unabashed:

“Coop.”

Trying to straight up, she takes a step back, but lamentably stumbles against him again.

“Do you think... they might consider giving me a raise now? I mean, this was the deepest shade of odd I have ever seen, and I've been to Vegas”, she says looking up with a sheepish grin.

Under her watch, h e goes from frowning in confusion to relief, the old light  back into place  in his eyes .  The spectacle is satisfying enough she can  anticipate his question:

“I'm fine, no I swear, I just know I'll be fine now but would you, would you hold me for a minute more? I don't really trust my feet yet.”

So they stay there, close, slowly warming up together beneath the descending sun, as Gordon and Jeffries watch silently, somber against the car.

“What happened in there exactly?”

She tells him, but that isn't a long story, since she cannot pretend to understand it fully.

“But how...? I didn't hear anything,” he sighs, letting it go as he probably let other things go before, she suspects, as he helped holding Phillip Jeffries back without too much surprise. She should have seen sooner that he would know, would accept those phenomena more easily than she did, not so disturbed by his inability to account for them. She should have shared more.

“This is a strange world, Diane. A strange, beautiful world, and I do not pretend to understand it, but I feel like I'm learning. Even though I'm overwhelmed sometimes. And wrong. Are you feeling better?”

S he nods, and catches Gordon's eye in the distance. They both  k now they will need to  talk , but later; for now they are all packed up again in the car, silent.  T iredness  is catching up with her,  she can tell,  her knees brushing against Cooper's in the backseat, a treat her conscience apparently decided she earned by putting herself in danger or something— the  stakes were never that clear, but given the choice, she  likes to think she has been the heroin of this day. 

Despite that self-indulgent note, the atmosphere is hardly more relaxed than on their way in: Jeffries  took hold of her pad as soon as she was able to walk again, and Gordon is scrutinizing his neck  like he wants to burn a hole through it, never unclenching his teeth. Even Cooper, now that the fear has passed,  i s drifting away. She finds that she cannot allow this to happen again, not after the moment they had, a glimpse of their old relationship she misses so much she is willing to forget about the stillness of Caroline Earle's face, immobile on a corner of red carpeting.  S he  feels brave , or maybe it is the words she heard, all of them speaking of fragility, of briefness. But to her surprise, he speaks first, softly  and almost ashamed, as if confessing a secret:

“I never knew you could do these things.”

“I don't know if I _did_ something. I was just... there.”

Cooper looks at his shoes again, the posture he has been adopting for the last ten minutes. She sighs, and whispers:

“Look.”

This is hardly the time or place, but hopefully Gordon will be too caught up in his musings to care for office gossips, and she still isn't sure about Jeffries existential status, so she'll have to make do.

“I know a lot has...changed, lately, and from time to time, we may all need it,” she touches her hair, following his gaze, for that was always the problem in the first place and they both know it, although her hair stood for something else, something that has to do with magnetic tape and recorders, but dammit it is her hair, too, and she owns it without owing anyone an explanation.

“But it's still me. New leaves, same bamboo, don't you see?”

He has turned to face her, and she fights an urge to cup his cheek the way she did before. He's looking at her intently—in the corner of her eye she sees Jeffries turning in his seat to face Gordon, with an expression so heavy she is overcome by a wave of inexplicable sadness.

“Diane. You're not the problem. You'll never be the problem.”

“Then what is?”

Apparently the answer is so obvious to him he cannot utter one more syllable. She says in low tones, for fear that the two other agents may be too invested in what is supposed to be a bloody private backseat conversation:

“When we're back, I'll make coffee and you'll tell me again, okay? You'll tell me again about what happened that day, in the woods.”

He nods seriously, but pointing at the way her lids flutter, her whole body suddenly relaxing after that difficult sentence, states that they'd better do that tomorrow. She doesn't remember if she agrees or not: soon enough, her head lolls to the side, finding a natural place along his shoulder, softness among all these bones, and maybe it's the suit – she knows how much they cost after all, to be comfortable is the least they can offer – or maybe her exhaustion is far from natural, but for now she doesn't give a damn, and maybe she never will again.

 

**

 

As she falls asleep, she hears him asks:

“Wasn't Agent Earle supposed to be on that mission? I thought his report on Three Mile Island would get us the authorization we needed.”

She never hears the answer.

 

***

True to her words, on the next morning, after a night of strangely silent dreams, she pushes her chair at the side of his desk, and he retells the night of the killing, all over again.

He knows she doesn't mind; it's never the same story. There are holes in his reasoning, things he doesn't dare saying, she feels, but doesn't press it; it's good enough that they're able to talk again.

He used to tell her so many things. About his childhood, the first case he ever investigated (the Vanishing Bike Down the Lane). About spirituality and our perception of reality, although they often disagreed – she's not sure there's any salvation for her in meditation; if anything she has always craved for externalization. About herself, sometimes, when she was in the mood to test him. About random things he knew simply by the grace of being Cooper: the lifespan of some huge trees, the names of butterflies. We tend to forget the names of those things: animals too small to be minded, trees, flowers. One day she gets a bunch she cannot recognize for her life, and he just smiles: “Diane, I'm so glad someone finally made the connection between you and jewel-weed.” But Dale Cooper doesn't forget. He knows everything and everyone's name, every person in the Bureau and every bird on the street. He inhabits a world richer than the usual one, a world where nothing can pass unnoticed, or be erased, because when you know the names, you always keep a trace.

He tells her the name of the man he has killed as if it could summon him back from the dead. She can only look at him in sadness, for to her he is nothing but a dark lumberjack from fairy tales woods, not separable from the sound of the wind in the trees. And poor jokes made by Albert on the autopsy tape in order to keep her distracted from her task, as if it was humanly possible to forget you're writing down the particulars of a corpse. Not for the first time, it occurs to her she cannot tell Cooper any of this.

 

As he talks, she feels herself accomplishing, or desperately trying to accomplish, something that she isn't sure is fair, legit. He talks and she nods and occasionally comments, kindly, since she knows how to be kind but that's a skill she can rarely be bothered to use, not in this setting, not in this time either. But what she's really doing is trying to wrap him in a net of benevolence, to enshroud him in soft wool that will guard him from the ugliness, from the pain of his duties. The intention is pristine, but does that mean she is entitled to do so? To be the person to do so? She isn't a good band-aid, that much is certain, and isn't that akin to setting a trap? You cannot fancy yourself the local Aretha Franklin, energetically chanting “Freedom” everywhere you go, and then proceed to capture someone for yourself, no matter how much you want him to be safe.

She may be too suspicious of her own intentions. There are several Dianes now, as much as she wants to ignore them. Two, and maybe more, arguing at the back of her mind. A splitting, giving birth to a doubt.

She puts her hand on his shoulder and brushes it lightly to avoid any solemnity.

“You can tell these things to me, Coop. Scratch the job's description, it was written on a kitchen apron in Republican blood; I'm not just here for coffee. And I'm not made of sugar either. What I am, however, is your friend. At least I hope so.”

He looks like he is about to cry, and she almost regrets indulging in such declarations.

She really hopes she is her friend. Because if she isn't, she has no name for what she is doing now, and it might not be fair, might not be sane, might not be anything that she has experienced before and that alone is enough to scare her more than all the echoes in the dark.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And as usual, for the musical credits:  
> “The Electrician” is a rather nerve-racking song by the Walker Brothers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhQbT65qIJY.  
> "Baby its slow/ When lights/ Go low/ There's no help/ No".  
> Otherwise, the power stations' names are real ones. If, as the series tells us (?), evil comes from the Bomb, and there is evil in electricity, we just have to do the math—power stations cannot be good. In the next chapter, wait for a Blue Rose talk. Did I tell you this story came with a vague theory about Gordon's hearing problem? Because it does, more or less. Stay tuned for mysterious sounds and uncertain relationships.
> 
> Oh, and you can follow me on Tumblr @imagine-the-fanfiction (lame, I know, but I had different plans for the account originally, before it became a Twin Peaks/ middle-aged women appreciation blog).


	8. The Mute Woman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which everyone plays games, but no one says a word about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And I'm back, ashamed and sorry for the break. I have less free time this semester, and my “plot” went a bit out of hands, which means this is becoming harder to write. To think this was supposed to be a simple slow-burn, well. Um. We'll have that, and then some galleons of weirdness and mythology and world-building. On the other hand, this is suddenly more of a Lynchean (humble) homage than what is was supposed to be. This is a long one, and I have the next chapter almost finished too, but expect longer breaks for the time being. 
> 
> In this chapter you'll find:  
> Something (in)sane.  
> Something clumsy.  
> Something, or someone, belittled.  
> Something wanted, and something needed.  
> Something twice.  
> Something slack.  
> Something noir.  
> Something lost.  
> Something wounded.  
> Something else.

 

Oh, to be sure, she never took anything too seriously, being after all the learned tap-dancer, the girl from Alabama, too cool for school back when school was on the table and nothing like a proper princess even before that, when Jane wanted to play and she only invented devastating, dramatic deaths for each and every one of their fragile dolls. Events used to glide over her like shots of clear vodka on a Saturday night slippery counter. She can still hear her mother, in a loop, with that worn out voice she had, especially after vodka too, “Diane. Diane, I know you're listening. I don't _care_ what they said: you won't always be able to pretend life is a bloody joke!”

On some level, pushing 27, she was still convinced it was, and there was nothing in her recent escapades to persuade her otherwise **.** But after Limerick station, after days of being as high as Mary Poppins' kite on sheer weirdness, she needs come down hard and even Cooper's arms aren't enough to cushion her landing. It's the third night after their mission when she finally admits she doesn't know what's real anymore. The bathroom mirror is showing her an assemblage of shapes and bright colors – greens, silvers and pinks–, and she remembers what the old Diane, the one who had freshly been hired by a madman with earplugs, used to think: lunatics. All of them. Stuck in time and odd as hell, strangely cinematic. Cooper and his ethereal perfection; Pam, all artificial cheerfulness; worse, Isabelle, or Jeffries, uncanny, unstable. What had become of her, the sane, acid observer? She heard voices coming out of nuclear ventilators. 

People were always prepared to believe the most extravagant things about the FBI, favoring exotic tales over the clinical coldness of crime and punishment. To think she had been ill at ease with the idea of being a dispensable tool in the Bureau. She shouldn't have worried; she was in, oh yes, she was in deep. Now she was part of the fiction.

Many years later, with a cautiousness she will find highly suspicious, Albert will tell her that, for all she may say about Cooper's impossible existence, she's the one people fantasize about as some mythical creature. The invisible force behind the man. When the moment comes, she will shrug off the idea as ridiculous, because it sounds insulting and absurd: she's always around, stuck here in Philadelphia, and there's nothing romantic to type-writer's noise and general rudeness. This makes no sense at all, she will tell him. 

But right now, in the midst of this short-lived crisis, as she turns off the TV, closes every window shut in her apartment, cuts the water down to mute the pipes, unplugs the refrigerator and turns off the clock to keep even the tiniest noise away from her ears, it does make sense. She will forget, sure enough, and everything will feel light and not too consequential again, just a few more days, but fortunately, she takes the reasonable decision for once, and writes about the seriousness of these hours, about the weight, and the powerlessness. Her notebook then transforms into something more than a journal of strange things, and she is thankful for that, because the voices she hears now, calling her a creep, are too old and familiar to come from another dimension. When the silence becomes unbearable and she begins to fear she has gone deaf again, she hastily puts a random record at full volume and dances to the point of exhaustion. Acceptance, nevertheless, comes quicker than expected; all it takes, apparently, is to learn the name of the tale she has embarked upon. An impossible flower, unknown even to Dale Cooper.  


***

But Gordon is taking his sweet time about that conversation, the slimy coward, leading to unexpected consequences. The first person that comes knocking at her door is not here to make sure she is not loosing her mind or calling the press or bracing herself for the funniest lawsuit in the history. It's Pam. And she immediately smells a rat; since the buddy party she has refused to walk on that ground but she may need to reconsider. Pam's eyes are so wide and she hardly blinks when she asks, in a voice too high-pitched, even for her:

“Oh my God, Diane, how was it? A field trip! A real mission! I can't believe it, you've got to tell me everything!”

And yes, normally this kind of high-school locker talk would sound natural for Pam, who does get excited about absolutely anything, from extended hours in the local library to Cooper's new shirt. Not today though. She's not sure the problem doesn't come from the aftershock she is currently dealing with, but her voice doesn't sound right; there's a reverberation to it, or maybe a slight shaking, hard to pinpoint but audible, if she concentrates.

“How do you know about that?” she hears herself say before her brain even does the math. Limerick was as classified as can be, and that's too weak a word to talk about the level of secrecy in an FBI section directed by a man who once wire-taped an agent during his very retirement party. The only reason she knows about that, other than Gordon's occasional obliviousness, is because she had sweet talked someone into playing “Flash Light” and he came to shout a discrete “CAN'T YOU DANCE?” in her ear, hoping to cause a fucking distraction. There is no way Pam can legitimately know about the trip, especially so soon. Better not give her time to come up with a poor lie:

“Is Earle back in office?”

“Well, um,” Pam blinks, the picture of a trapped deer. “Not yet. I mean I'm sure he will, soon enough, but the mission...he…”

Watching as Pam goes back on pre-recorded track is quite fascinating, her speech looping to what she was originally saying.

“So, what I mean is, it's only me now and that's why I thought “why not pay her a visit” and then I heard about your exploits and my, Diane, I'm so impressed! You kind of made it sound like it wasn't your dream job at first, but isn't it like a promotion? Do you feel like an agent? Think about Barrow's face!”

There is something peculiar in her eyes, a painful undertone that looks like an apology. Wonderful; is that how things are now? Earle's game lashing out in her face while she's still struggling to figure out Gordon's and fighting a headache while refusing to ask herself where Jeffries stands in all this? Did she accidentally took a side before even knowing how many of them there is? Holy shit she doesn't want to play that game, and neither does Pam; you can almost see the strings attached to the girl's limbs. Earle is a dirty bastard, using her for his clumsy spying; he must be quite upset, wherever he is right now, because even she could see this was a poor plan to begin with. Or maybe it's his refined way to let her know he's watching.

“Not much of a story I'm afraid. I don't even understand why they took me out. What about you? How's work? I've heard they had lost touch with Earle, doesn't he gives any news at all?”

Pam deflates before her eyes, her voice dropping down by an octave.

“He left me instructions, every time. We have rules, so it all runs smoothly when he's out, because his job is so demanding and...and dangerous. And I think he's… worried I make mistakes when he's not around, you know, I mean that makes sense, I tend to be,” she lets out a broken laugh, clinging nervously to a lock of her blond hair with a clenched fist, “clumsy.”

She can be very soft, when she wants to be. She has a good voice for softness, ironically. Gently, she offers, holding Pam's shoulder as if she was indeed a real friend and not a piece of human garbage:

“Let me buy you a slice of pie. We'll talk, if you want. Martha told me they were making some today, and of course I get a free notice every time because of Coop…”

Just this once. This once she will play Earle's game, and nevermore.

**

Somewhere in the middle of the long conversation they have that afternoon, she learns that Pam has a degree in  international relations . From Columbia. She tries not to yell, she really does. She could have worked in diplomacy, have a job that pays, people working under her, but  “my father heard that they were hiring here, so he told me that would be a good start; he said he had met my mother when she was acting as a temp in the Navy's administration, so that could turn out very well if I was lucky.”

S he reminds herself to breath evenly.

“Earle, does he know? About your qualifications?”

“Of course, he hired me himself.”

She doesn't trust herself enough to speak now, but her face must speak volumes, for after a minute of silence Pam bursts out:

“Why are you so mad at me? What should I do? I can't leave now, I like...I like feeling useful, they need me, Windom needs me, to make his life easier, and it's small things, true, but I feel like it's important too and...I mean, I mean just _look_ at me! This is for me and I...I mean I like this, I like that they're not afraid of me, because I don't want to live alone! I just can't, I don't know how to, I want a family, and I want a home, because otherwise what is there out there for me? I'm not like you Diane, I hate speaking up, we can't all be… part of… I don't know what this is, okay, I don't even care, I just want...”

The rest is lost to her because Pam is crying now, her small face reddish and her eyes two giant pools of tears. This is what you get when you let Earle set the rules: guilt. People are not like doors. Working with Cooper had taught her nothing.

**

The worst part is,  she reflects on her way back from the cafeteria, barely walking straight for wanting so much to punch the wall, she knows what Pam wants.  She heard it all before,  from another mouth, years ago . It shouldn't be important, not in the middle of that thickening Bureau plot, but it is somehow.

Want is a strange currency in this society, an urge that is never entirely your own. Pam wants what everybody expects her to want. Power, on the other hand, comes with the ability to convince others of what their heart should desire. She's well-aware people often imagine her to be shallow, what with the hair and the carelessness, but she's always felt this, instinctively, and always tried not to fall for it. Not that she will ever explain to anyone that she intends to live as serene as a Stoic, bare of want. Say what you will about the uselessness of humanities, she did love that philosophy course at SF State; it actually gave her a sense of how all this worked. Take her lovers, for instance. She pretends not to understand why they think they have to keep covering her in gifts and offerings, but on a deep level, it is rather obvious; they all want something from her, and that's the usual protocol.

So she stands her ground as she can, tries not to want anything, anyone, too much. Jane, on the other hand, was never like that. Since her first conversation with Pam, her voice keeps coming back to her, as much as she wants to ignore the memories it brings along. Jane, as a child, always wanted to wear the plastic tiara and clip earrings, revered the fake diamonds and oversized peals; early on, she wanted to be a queen. When Diane, who was something like 9, cut her long golden hair to test the scissors she had inherited from their grandma, she cried for hours that she _wanted_ it to grow back immediately. She couldn't be a princess without it, she couldn't be anything anymore and she hated her, hated her, hated her. 

That was the problem with want.  Impossibilities. 

Needs were different, strangely more manageable, especially since she had discovered there were very few things she really needed. Art – this one was  non-negotiable ( “my God you were always such a snub, I'm sorry for making you look down at us mortals!” ) . Some company, good company, nothing too specific though, she was open to a lot; good sex too  (“Do you really think they respect you?”) . Something to do that can keep her interested  (“I'm sorry, am I too boring for you?”) . 

There. 

This was vague enough to be sustainable, sustainable in this economy, in  a society in which, if she let s herself want something too much, she might have to sacrifice portions of a freedom so few of them ha d in the first place. 

The only specific thing she needs is a sense of self she gets to define on her own, to sculpt slowly, bit by bit, to smooth and paint like those marble gods  from Antiquity,  who originally came in bright colors, although now we always see them  as pristine presence , because so much time have passed we forgot how they're supposed to look like. Something like that was hard to find,  egotistic maybe,  but so far it ha d been the only way to wash herself off everything others wanted her to want, to be  (“Be quiet”) . There was something to be said for independence. 

But right now, Pam doesn't need philosophical bullshit; that part is for her own benefit only. Later, maybe, when she can sort out a way to lash out at Earle for this without hurting her.

**

Right now, though, is a time for heading straight, fuming, to Gordon's office and end all this. She's too busy rehearsing her angry speech in her head – this time he's not wriggling out of it with a vaguely progressive remark and a sad smile, and while they're at it, he can explain if he actually made her a witch or not – so she only takes passing note of Isabelle's mysterious absence in the antechamber. The office door is closed, which means so may even get to slam things – what a day—it's open now, and she freezes.

In the familiar room, against the wall of pine trees, she sees two very different things at once. The first one is Gordon and Philip Jeffries, hands at each other's throats so that she cannot tell which one is trying to strangle the other, or if they're both equally engaged in that entertaining activity. The second one is Gordon and Philip Jeffries, hands inside each other's shirts so that she cannot tell which one is trying to undress the other while kissing with a passion edging on violence. It's not that there are four people in that office; it's one of those ambivalent pictures where you can see two images at once, depending on the angle, the light, or the part you focus on.

She blinks, and a sharp ringing immediately makes her crouch in pain, as if her brain had been cut in two. She grabs the door frame for support, while the odd scene unfolds, her interruption seemingly unnoticed. It would be hard to explain, say, to a police officer, but her first reflex is to cover her ears and shut the door close again. The ringing stops.

What, she can only think, what the hell just happened. Sure, this is Gordon's office, but it also felt like opening a door unto a different dimension; everything in there looked so still, so distant. It's only after a moment that she realizes she might just had walked out on a murder scene, or at least a very serious fight. But she cannot… she cannot open that door again. Her hand won't obey. So she just presses her ear to the door, and tries to identify any incriminating noise, clenching her fists to keep them from trembling. Why the hell isn't Isabelle around? For all she knows it's probably her job to deal with this kind of surreal shenanigans and to prevent Gordon from dying—it sure felt like it was part of the job when she was doing it—fuck, what a terrible, terrible day.

“Just look at yourself, Philip. Just look,” she hears, the voice extremely distorted.

“You of all people don't get to say that to me.” Jeffries's voice sounds so much closer to the door that it should be, almost as if he was talking in her ear, which makes her jump.

“I miss you.”

“Sometimes I think I miss myself but then I realize it's probably you messing with my thoughts, because that's what you do, don't you?”

Gathering her courage, she pushes the door open a few inches, and this time she only sees the kiss. Is that wishful thinking, or did she make it happen? Who chooses between those two scenarios? Actually, this sounds like an important question. Who gets to choose?

She retreats to her own office, still a bit dizzy, and when Gordon answers his direct line half an hour later with a “WHY ARE YOU USING THIS NUMBER DIANE, IS SOMEONE ON FIRE OR DID YOU LOST ANOTHER BET TO ALBERT, BECAUSE YOU KNOW I'M ALWAYS ONE FOR PRANK CALLS BUT I'M ACTUALLY WAITING FOR THE PRESIDENT TO RING” she supposes she is, what was the term again, reassured. Properly reassured.  


***

“Does Gordon knows anything about her interruption” is probably a stupid question, and she's not, by a long shot, a stupid woman. Which doesn't mean she has the guts to touch the subject; and so she doesn't go near his office for another week or three. Gordon doesn't call either; in fact, he doesn't even call Cooper, and they are eventually left with nothing to do, as the hottest days of June kick in. Maybe he really did get murdered that day; maybe she spoke to an impersonator on the phone (it's not that hard, Desmond does it all the time to annoy her). She let herself caress the thought when she feels particularly fierce, and the rest of the time she simply worries. Albert comes by, reassures her by explaining he's simply giving them the “Cole shoulder”: it happens from time to time, when he's engrossed in some solitary mission and cannot be bothered to report.

“No one has seen him for days, but I was on his floor this morning and I heard him amorously yelling at Isabelle for his 1941 copy of _The Garden of Forking Paths_. The intellectual clown will be fine.”

She knows he expects her to make a retort featuring something along the lines of “the garden of fucking paths,” but she really isn't in the mood right now. They haven't talk since she was sent on this surreal mission, allegedly on his behalf, and somehow it's not that easy to blurt out “by the way I'm hearing things from alternate dimensions now” in between two sneers. She misses him thought. They should at least get drunk.

“So, I'll be on my way,” he eventually says after shooting her a curious look. “You really should open a damn window; it's so hot one gets the feeling you've been making out all morning with Clark Gable's dummy here.”

Oh, for fuck's sake. He grins sadistically, shutting the door behind him as she closes her eyes in frustration and wonders if she shouldn't steal a scalpel from his lab to end this kind of display for good. She really hopes Cooper, who's currently listening to one of his “Sounds” tapes in the back (probably the sea one), hasn't heard a word of it.

Albert's not entirely wrong though. They're really slack today. For one thing they are both barefoot: she abandoned her sandals under the desk hours ago, and Cooper probably had an impromptu yoga session during lunch break. His shirt collar is open, two buttons at least—she distractedly counted them as they pop out, respectively two and half an hour ago. Her lemon yellow dress clings to her like a melting popsicle, so thin and light it feels it could fly away, if there were any wind, any wind at all in this sealed office. She reminded herself of some sort of refreshing drink this morning in the mirror, with the addition of the bright green hair she's currently trying to push out of her face with minimal success. God, and now she needs an umbrella cocktail, she shouldn't listen to herself thinking.

The blinds are closed, the room striated with mild shadow and bright sun light, and they are idle. She's ahead of her tapes, her files are in order, and she feels too crushed by the heat to reorganize her desk for what would be the third time this month anyway.

When Cooper finally approaches her an hour later, she's doing her nails, painting her fingers carefully with renewed layers of silver and pink after removing the old coat with a bottle of solvent she usually keeps around for her record-playing days, her Cooper-less days. He must have been lured by the smell.

“Don't look,” she says without looking up. “I hate doing this with an audience. Besides, I don't have anything on yet.”

Arguably, it must sound weird. Especially since the “Diane, you love having an audience” she expects hangs in the air, unsaid – at first she's afraid that she's beginning to _hear_ him too, but no, it's just that she knows him well enough by now.

“Does this mean I'm not allowed to see your nails without polish?” he asks instead, obviously amused by how prudish she knows she is sounding. If that's the way he wants to play it, fine, she's bored anyway and she could use some good old bantering to set her mind right.

“Absolutely. Makes me feel naked.”

After all, this is entirely true. She hates when people ask her original hair tint too: that information is classified the way most of their cases are now. It's not like the color of her roots is relevant to any delusion people might have about her. If the idea disturbs Cooper in any way, it doesn't show, and he keeps an innocent face all through it:

“Alright, but in that case I think you should be informed that I can see your ankles from my desk without even having to crane my neck at an odd angle. Is that a problem too?”

She sighs, adopting a serious tone as she blows on her little finger.

“No, I guess ankles are okay in terms of nakedness. Most things are. If I show them I show them, and that is not really open for discussion, but what I do not show… oh you mean you can see them because I've got my feet on this chair? Come on Coop you don't even like the thing.”

Right, so maybe she monopolized the only extra chair in their tiny office, and Cooper had to put his own feet on his desk in a truly Desmond-like fashion. Cry me a river. With her current salary, there's very slim chance she'll make enough money in her old age to be able to retire in decent conditions, so if she'll be typing reports for the rest of her life, she'll at least make it moderately comfortable.

“Besides”, she adds with a smirk, “I'm sort of a secret agent now, this must mean I have to begin to have some actual secrets, even for you.”

Cooper eyebrows shoot up, and he leans against the defective window, crossing his arms.

“I don't know what you're talking about; as far as I'm concerned, you've always been filed with secrets. Screened by all these flowers, you know.”

She couldn't tell why but his choice of words triggers an unpleasant ringing in her ears, signaling the beginning of a headache. There is no reason for that, she sees where he comes from; the room is currently full of very dry azaleas, stuck in bunch in various water glasses all over the floor. A bit macabre maybe, she can give him that; but then it's not her fault she had to break up with Diego, he wanted her to meet his parents for God's sake.

When she finally looks up, feeling vaguely guilty for some reason, his cheeks are reddened from the heat and his shirt seems closer to his torso than it should be, in her humble opinion. It's three buttons now, as if to take revenge on her for the whole nakedness talk.

“I can't say we look very professional today, don't we Diane?” he asks quietly, wistfully turned at the window.

She actually pauses in her nail polishing to smile, trying to ignore his collarbone's surprise comeback:

“Sure, but I could tell you things from my Gordon days that would make the boy-scout in you shiver.”

On a sudden inspiration, she adds:

“In fact… let me just finish this and I'll tell you of a game we may play, since we're apparently on leave today.”  


***

She knows where the game comes from. She knows and it means they probably shouldn't play, but it's her own version, not Gordon's, and she doesn't see what harm could come of it; besides, Cooper is absolutely brilliant at it, if a bit too earnest, as she knew he would be, and the light is just right. She even borrowed a couple of those long, thin cigarettes Emma from Accounting smokes all the time, probably thinking it gives her a mysterious look. At her signal, Cooper puts his feet back on his desk and rocks back in his chair like someone who has no care in the world and doesn't give a damn about posture.

“Diane, this town's not for me; I can feel it,” he says in a voice that is lower, more assertive than usual. There he is, she cannot help but think. The self-possessed, macho Cooper she never got to meet. She straightens up at her desk, pretending to type as he continues:

“There's something here that is waiting for me in the dark, that looks for me in every back alley, in every smoky bar… And that man you just saw, well, I think he wasn't here by chance.”

That's her cue, and she makes sure to remember chewing on her piece of gum, for style, changing her voice to something more cheeky, while she crosses her legs with deliberation.

“By chance or by the fact that you're the city's second-best detective, boss.”

The look on his face is worth a million dollar, and that was quite mean of her but boy, she has zero regrets to declare. He pulls himself together almost instantly though, like a true professional.

“That too, but never dwell too much on your successes, that is my motto. Philly's not my oyster; the booze is good and the girls are swell, but if I'm not mistaken, that is a murder I won't be able to solve. I've been waiting for this case all my life.”

“Pretty gruesome murder too, boss,” she comments in a jaded tone that says _well, what's one more corpse in_ _the_ _world?_ “That girl was so young, I wonder what kind of monster would do that.”

“Evil, Diane, is a many-faced thing, but in the present matter, I think we'll discover mountains of underwater sins. You don't die like this, I mean, not by accident. The details indicates someone close to the victim, very close, the closest you could ever been… Could you light me up, sweetheart?”

The coy bastard. She had it coming, so she refrains from rolling her eyes, and takes her lighter in her purse. He never smokes, courtesy of his asthma, and she is curious to see where this is going; it would seem he also used their pre-game break to borrow some cigarettes around.

While she held the flame close to his mouth, he continues:

“In fact, I think there's a very simple explanation to our witness seeing the victim at her window exactly two hours after the crime took place.”

She is still bent toward him, so that she can whispers with pretend shock, her breath playing with a solitary lock of hair misplaced against his temple:

“You're not suggesting...”

“Yes, Diane,” he says, deadly serious. “Twins.”

 

At that point, the drag he has taken from his cigarette comes back in the form of a strangled coughing fit, while she looses control, finally laughing her head out.

“Oh come on Cooper, _twins_? I can't believe you, you're supposed to be so creative and all that jazz!”

He says hoarsely, somewhat offended:

“We said we were going for old-school: what could be more old-school than this? But really,” he adds with a lopsided grin, “I think this life-style is bad for my health, Diane.”

“I would say so, “boss”. And don't sweetheart me for God's sake, you're erasing months of activism to get Gordon in line.”

“Oh, I know, but “second-best”? That was low. My feelings are hurt” he declares solemnly, emphatically putting a hand on his heart.

“You don't know those hard-boiled secretaries, they can be _vicious_. I can tell you that this Diane's not waiting nicely for her boss to come back from dangerous mission, typing lullabies to make her pile of files grow.”

He's probably about to retort something clever when the phone rings. Taken aback by this sudden peak in activity, she picks up but forgets the usual opening monologue:

“Hello?”

“Hello? Um, is this Dale Cooper's office?”

The woman voice sounds as surprised as her, but many years later she will reflect that the fact she didn't give her name was to put to her credit, ultimately. It's a fragile voice, clear but hesitant, and she can hear the cracks under the words, she can, but she doesn't say a thing, waving for Cooper to take the call on his own line. From the way he says “hello”, she understands he's been waiting for this call, God only knows for how long. His face, lighted up with laughter a minute ago, is now so serious it barely moves at all. She gives him a last look, not wanting to know, feeling utterly stupid with her long cigarette and the sickly-sweet taste of gum in her mouth, and closes the intermediary door separating their office on this grave secret that chains Dale Cooper to Caroline Earle. She doesn't say a thing and for that she will blame herself for years.  


***

Eventually, the name of story, what she has been expected, comes on one of those long, muffled days. The kind of day when everything is wrapped in cotton, because she had one too many vodka martini at the bar she let Albert take her to the night before, a night that may or may not have ended with karaoke, regardless of the fact he made her swear never to sing again in his presence since what is now refereed to as “The Day Before You Came Incident”, back at Mildred from HR's birthday party. It's not her fault that about seven people somehow got the idea she was singing the song for them specifically; she gets intense when she sings, that's a well-known Diane Fact, one that took Cooper less than a year to figure out, although she doesn't recall ever singing in his presence now that she thinks about it. And anyway it was just a miscalculation of ABBA's inevitable impact, as she tried to explain to a very pissed Albert after he had to carry all the free drinks her performance magically generated.

It might not just be the hangover, though; she's used to the comforting arms of alcohol-induced migraine, of her unmanageable brain being padded like an asylum cell. Today, however, is more a matter of things feeling out of grasp, distant, distant to the touch. The bamboo, that sits in its designated corner of the office, just stares back at her with indifference as she tries to decide if that extra stalk was there yesterday. That thing used to be ridiculously small and inoffensive, the sweetest gift, and now it has grown a temper, which it was doomed to do after sitting through so many hours by her side in a hundred square feet.

She cannot reach back to the person she was when she received that gift. Black haired and presumptuous, all fences and walls, it's not been that long really, really not that long, but time, here… Could she rewind herself like she used to rewind Cooper, back when she was unable to accept his inevitable loss to the waves? Does she even want to? Somehow, whoever she has become since that day, and since she has heard all those inexplicable sounds, feels more important than she ever felt before. But indistinctly, she knows she has lost something in the process too. Philip Jeffries didn't end up manifesting himself in her office by sheer accident.

Cooper's working in Desmond's office today, trying to make something of some unusual fingerprints lift. She refused to follow through, obviously, insisting that she had a life of her own that didn't include frowning in disapprobation at luxury deer-skin shoes while they rested on a messy pile of case files for two straight hours. But he left his recorder on his desk.

She can see it through the glass panel, a black square whose presence is becoming more and more difficult to ignore. If she could just… It's heavier than expected when she finally takes it in her hand. Is this a violation? She can always delete it later. Yes, delete it. So that she doesn't have to listen to their two voices mingle when she receives his next tape. It would only be an experiment, a one-time thing, she is positive. This day is too strange for her to let that chance pass.

Her shaky finger press the record button.

“Diane...” she hears herself breath in the mic, coldness enveloping her whole body at once. It's June, for god's sake, she shouldn't feel like this; she loves June, and yet it's suddenly 30 degrees in her personal weather bubble. That is all she says; she doesn't need anything more. Gone for good now. The tape is abandoned in one of her drawers as she decides that today, she is making tea.  


**

The tinge of Lady Grey bitterness has barely spread over her tongue when she hears an irregular rattle at the door. Or is that more of a scratching? Inexplicably, the only thing she can think is that there is a wild, wounded animal out there, on the 4th floor of a highly secured building, in the heart of Philadelphia. She opens despite of herself, thinking of her late disturbing experiences with doors, only to find herself facing a mass of red, curly hair. The elusive dancing woman. Lil, Pam had said. Lil.

“Hello…?” she tries, uncertain, as the other woman makes her way into the room on swaying legs. She was always moving like this on the few occasions Diane saw her before, and it is only now she notices it reminds her of Jeffries. Lil looks at her with an intensity that makes her uneasy, before pointing one finger to the light-bulb and pressing another to her lips, raising her eyebrows as if they were sharing a big secret.

“I'm sorry, are you sure you're,” she has no time to finish her sentence, which is just as well probably, because Lil takes her face between her hands and proceed to examine it with great care, scanning her slowly from forehead to chin. It's like looking into a distorted mirror. Most of the woman's features seemed to have been painted by a Parisian artist of the 30s: the skin is too white, the brows too thin and black the way coal, not hair, is black. Peculiar tastes in makeup are probably to blame, and coming from her that would amount to call the kettle black, but as Lil grabs her hands and begin to study her nails with attention, pressing them distractedly as if she expected some magical reaction out of the gesture, it becomes apparent that the problem extends past powder and liner. She's usually very defensive when strangers try to touch her (and by defensive she means ready to break some jaws); not this time though: Lil, with her feather-light touches, seems fearful. Looking for something to say that would make her stop counting her fingers with growing anxiety, she helplessly asks:

“Your name is Lil, right?”

Almond-shaped eyes focus on her again. At that very moment, the light flickers faintly, as it sometimes does, and out of nowhere small, high-pitched sounds escape the woman's red mouth, breathy little cries that express an unmistakable sense of distress. “I don't think she can speak at all”, she remembers Pam had said. Or maybe she won't speak, for reasons that belong only to her. Her face contorts in every directions at once under Diane's perplexed gaze, the noises getting stronger and stronger.

“Please”, she tugs at her arm and get a chair from Cooper's office to make her sit down, hoping to contain her, “please, calm down, everything's fine!”

On a whim, she presses her palms on the back of Lil's hands, to make them rest flat on her desk. Instantly, the woman calms down, looking up with a radiant smile. A long-forgotten spot in Diane's chest softens: she doesn't know what she did to earn such gratefulness, but hell, Cooper looks at her like that sometimes too, with no more cause.

Lil produces some more noises, sounding a bit like a scratched vinyl—appreciative noises this time, or at least that's what she makes of them. Sitting in her own chair, her legs a bit weak from all this absurd interlude, she takes a moment to think. The last time someone payed her an unexpected visit, it didn't go conventionally either; if this is becoming a pattern, she may as well adjust. Still, her lips are slightly trembling when she offers:

“Would you like some tea?”

Lil nods, and she isn't surprised. Of course she would want tea; that woman in front of her is the very incarnation of what tea has come to mean to her. It is a drink for strangeness and contemplation.  


*

They are both sipping at their drinks, silently, breathing in the hot mist coming out of the mugs, and she cannot tell if it's the orange peel or if she genuinely made herself sad just by standing there in a companionable silence with a woman who cannot say a word. Lil is taking small sips, and then weirdly rocks her head back a bit, swallowing with a sort of spasm. The whole process seems rather painful, but she keeps giving her timid smiles, chirping under her breath as if she was having a pleasant conversation with herself. Bird-like sounds echo in the still air of the office, never achieving any degree of coherence, and yet a corner of her soul vibrates back, intuitively, some minor chord she usually keeps quiet because regrets never did any good to anyone. It's the most unsettling thing, she thinks, the most unsettling thing, as she feels tears coming to her eyes, and melancholy engulf her.

A small white hand reaches for her across the desk, uncertain but comforting. Though she doesn't say anything, Diane hears the words very clearly in her head:

_Thank you._

Okay then. Maybe she can makes this work after all.

She gave Lil her own mug—she is the guest after all—which means she's currently drinking from Cooper's, enriching her tea with a caffeine aftertaste because obviously the damned thing is never really clean. Not that's it's a problem, really; he knows she does that from time to time, finds purple lipstick on the ledge, and never exactly retaliates. Except for the times he steals a bite of her daily apple; she always has trouble finishing lunch after those. It's the shock of being reminded that, for all his sweetness and elegance, Dale Cooper can bite. She doesn't handle the thought well; in fact, she only watches the neat mark, the way the polished apple skin broke, lime green cut over mushy, softer white, and shivers long and hard.

Lil is caressing her mug like it's a particularly stiff kitten, using only the tip of her fingers. It's an old blue thing, very simple, that Diane loves dearly, and that she managed not to break through the years.

_Blue_ , she hears, and smiles to Lil, who looks like she has figured something out of it.

“Yes,” she says, instead of “I can hear you”, but the miraculousness of the situation is not lost in the choice of words.

“I really like that shade of blue. You would believe it's nothing at all, just primary blue out of a child's paintbox, but that's not quite true. Everything is in the “not quite”. You think the color's familiar, but you never really grow accustomed to it. It's like art.”

In response, Lil scrunches up her entire face as if she had just bitten into a lemon, and Diane feels called out on her fake-deep tea talk.

“Yeah well, I basically reinvented Klein Blue, didn't I? Always had an artistic flair; but Gordon keeps whining about some contract I supposedly signed, according to which I have to stay here and type,” she laughs.

At the sound of Gordon's name, Lil shrieks and begins to mouth excitedly, too quickly for her to even attempt to lipread.

“Oh, okay, could you slow down a bit? I didn't catch that, I'm just beginning to...” There's a faint noise, and as she concentrates it gradually turns into the word _chapel_. _Gordon, chapel. Gordon is waiting for her in the chapel._

“You mean now?”

A nod. That would explain it, she supposes. Very typical.

“But – sorry – why sending you? What do you have to do with all this?”

A raise of an eyebrow. She doesn't need to look for any echo, this one is obvious enough: _I sent myself._

“Will you come down with me then?”

The idea of meeting with Gordon in the chapel, alone, suddenly doesn't appeal to her all that much. The amount of plastic and fake marble in there makes her nervous.

But Lil shakes her head frantically, scared again. She gets up and heads for the door quickly, opening and closing her mouth like an anxious fish.

“Wait,” Diane cries, taking her hand before she can pass the threshold. “Would you...”

She's about to say “would you come back some time?”, but doesn't get to finish that sentence either, because right in the middle of it, Lil opens her mouth again, and she sees her tongue. Or rather. She sees the space where her tongue should be, if things were normal here, if people were alright, safe, unhurt, if she didn't hear sounds she should not hear and if Dale Cooper didn't have to kill anyone for a living.

“Who did that to you?” she whispers, horrified, because at that point this is obvious that what she is witnessing in not the product of some accidental malformation. It looks like her tongue has been severed, or burnt, if that's even possible. The shock is so great she barely registers Lil's hand on her face again, gently caressing her cheek. It lasts only for a moment; soon she's mouthing one last _chapel_ and then she's gone, dancing her way to the end of the corridor.

She'll get to the fucking chapel in a moment. Right now, what she really need is to sit down, finish her tea, and process.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Flash Light” by Parliamant is a funk, psychedelic thing and it is extremely catchy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0ZGNGBNIL8.  
> The Garden of Forking Paths, by Borges, is relevant to this story, given that it's arguably the mother story of all alternate universes (I'm sure Gordon likes it).   
> The Blue Rose conversation will be in the next chapter, I swear. In fact, the next chapter will essentially consists in a lot of Gordon, and a bit of Cooper (cheers). 
> 
> Questions, requests, flames? Leave a message, we can talk. Or you can find me on Tumblr, @imagine-the-fanfiction (still lame, still standing).


	9. The Deaf Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we hear about possibilities, as Gordon and Diane talk about plastic, gum, emotions and crying women.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is mostly one block, so there's no real need for a map here. But I think I owe you a summary, since it's been so long since some of the mentioned events took place, and you probably don't want to go back and read all that again. 
> 
> So here comes: Diane's been sent on a mission with Gordon at Limerick power station, following the Three-Mile Island accident. There she heard echoes of Twin Peaks's conversations, coming out of the ventilation room. Which is uncanny because she is a) thousands of miles from Twin Peaks and b) those conversations haven't happened yet and won't for another ten years. It's not exactly a new thing though; she heard strange words on multiple occasions before, coming from nowhere. Gordon owes her an explanation, but has been postponing it, until Lil dances her way to Diane's office. Lil's mute, her tongue severed for unknown reasons, but she can still hear what she wants to say to her: go to the chapel to meet Gordon. 
> 
> And here is the long due Blue Rose conversation, setting some of the themes for the plot, but not actually, you know, explaining anything, because it's Gordon after all.

 

She hasn't been down in the fake chapel since the last time she dyed her hair. Since she unintentionally gave Cooper the impression that him ending the life of a man had effectively affected the balance of the world, and even created a whole new Diane. Green is good on her, but still. More than any other religious structure, this is a place to hide from your mistakes.

The damned room – it would be weird to talk about a building when they are, in fact, in the Bureau's basement, but the chapel has always been way too big for its use, maybe even too big to really _fit_ under the administrative floors – never smelt like the other places of worship she knows. In fact, it doesn't smell like anything, just void and probably plastic, the weird scent of overheated electric candles gathering dust in the altar. The lack of burning incense or decaying flowers has always stricken her as suspicious, as if the chapel refused her any sense of intimacy, the distant allusion to death's inevitability that is the basic demand to make on any religious system. She's not the most spiritual person in the world, arguably, but she's pretty sure there is a problem with the way this place is designed, and above all a problem with the roses. She never once saw these particular flowers entering or leaving the building, as she never saw any other human being seated in the alleys before today, the back of Gordon's spray of hair, but they are always there, every time she walks in out of boredom or guided by a desire to hide, always fresh. Fresh flowers, and she sees no reason for that to be.

Gordon's expression is too neutral when she sits down next to him, and it occurs to her he probably chose this place because there was a chance the twisted solemnity of the dome would prevent her from yelling at him.

“Okay,” she hears herself say after a stretching moment of silence, “I'll give you my line: what the _fuck_?”

Only it's not her voice, not exactly; there is all this white noise enshrouding it, something she hasn't been able to perceive before; hell it's not as if she ever tried to talk aloud in this hellish room, she was always happy enough to sit there and listen to the silence. Gordon watches her intently, waiting for her to notice the acoustic difference.

“Do you come here often?” he asks and it suddenly clicks, because he isn't yelling, although the trouble he takes to articulate his words is as painful to witness as ever. If for one second she lets herself consider the world as a network of radio stations, they have reached the frequency to which Gordon addresses most of his sentences, the liminal space he's always communicating with. It's the same one they encountered when role-playing in his office; it's the same one that threatened to fry her brain at Limerick power station.

“When I can't avoid it,” she ends up answering. “I'm not even sure to which cult this is supposed to pertain. No coherence; it looks vaguely Christian but for all I know we could be sitting in a Krishna hideout Sam Stanley uses to store his weed. Except of course if we are looking at Our Mother of Cheap Plastic.”

Gordon doesn't say anything but does this disturbing quirk of his, when he looks at her for a minute, then goes to stare in front of him in the distance, and then back at her, again and again. It grates on her nerves like nothing in the world, so she finally barks:

“So, did you really need five weeks or so to come up with this creepy dramatization, or did my newly acquired monkey tricks failed to maintain your interest altogether?”

This man must be immune to bitterness, since he after all chose to collaborate with someone as cheerful and well-meaning as Albert. He only frowns:

“Five weeks? It's been five weeks already? Are you sure?”

And, seeing the pointed look she is giving him:

“I'm sorry Diane, I must have lost track, quite literally in this case, if you get my meaning.”

She's not sure she does, which is exactly the problem with him (well, _one_ of them at least, she's been giving too much attention to the others as it is), believing he can keep being vague as fuck and raising his eyebrows like one of the Marx Brothers, waiting for the metaphysical penny to drop.

“Gordon, what happened to that woman's tongue?” she says instead of “give me one good reason not to beat you into a pulp”, somehow using the same intonation.

His sighs sound deeper here than they do in normal rooms; maybe that's why she always thought Gordon didn't care.

“Do you know that this church existed before the FBI building was even built? They found it just as it stands now, when testing the ground to draw plans for the lower levels. Not a pebble has moved since then.”

Trying to ignore the way his blue eyes are now resting on her expectantly, she quickly reviews her basic knowledge of FBI's history.

“But this address is very new, right? I mean we've only been there for, what, a good five years?”

Gordon nods appreciatively:

“You're very right, of course. Nevertheless, when the room was first opened, they found disturbing evidence of it having been built long before that, decades ago if I'm to believe that very sweaty chap from Harvard Washington sent me. Archeologist or something. Although the place appeared to be sealed, it contained several impossibilities, namely some very dry starches of corn, a stack of gum packs whose brand had disappeared in the 20s, and a very naked woman.”

She blinks.

“A woman?”

While having her own definition of what it means to be _very naked_ , she's prepared to bet it doesn't align with Gordon's.

“That was Lil, Diane. Well, you saw her, she was eager to meet you. It took us a while to understand her, at first, but we learned to communicate, and now I guess you could say she works for us. I mean I sure hope that she does, it isn't always clear. But she gave us a hand more than once when things got tricky and we were deep in the mud, and there's not much point worrying about indiscretions here.”

Lil, alone, naked, and probably hurt, in a cave that wasn't supposed to exist, back in…

“Wait. What? You said the room was exactly as it is now? What about all the fake glass? What about, I don't know, atrocious electric candles? Am I supposed to believe this ugly thing dates back from the roaring twenties, when they were still too drunk to even think of inventing plastic?”

She pauses, unsure. “And how old is Lil?”

There is a tired expression settling on Gordon's round face. It occurs her now that, when he doesn't have to yell, he actually doesn't sound that ridiculous – not that she should be too generous with a man who have the answers to all the questions and is still making her guess.

“Well this is just why I wanted to talk to you, Diane. Or to brief you, as Isabelle keeps saying since apparently I don't let my interlocutors enough space to react or express whatever they're getting their pants in a twist for – never understood that expression. Anyway, we, by which I mean a small numbers of us in the Bureau, have a word for this kind of situation where things go all bananas.”

So much for being generous, then. She's about to passive-aggressively raise an expressive eyebrow at him but suddenly, the words present themselves to her, so clearly and vibrantly in the pure silence of the chapel that she has no choice but to say them before he gets the chance:

“ _Blue Rose_.”

Gordon clicks his tongue appreciatively.

“See? I do let people talk back. I knew you were good. I told her you were good.”

The shaky breath she's been holding for some time finally finds its way out, tempered by a healthy dose of irritation, as she shuts her eyes and rubs her fingers against her temples.

“Let me get this as straight as I can. Gordon. I hear things. Correct? I'm not inventing that.”

“Yep.”

She's going to throttle him, she really is. They'll find the body in a few days and chances are they'll believe he choked on a bad pierogi because, let's be honest, everybody knows that's how Gordon goes, eventually.

“Those words, they come from elsewhere, I gather. Is that “elsewhere” a different place, or… I'm just throwing ideas over the place here, a different time? How am I doing on your craziness scale, so far? Too optimistic? Or is that an elaborate prank you pulled with Jeffries after you hired some model from off-Broadway to play the part of Cooper for a laugh?”

There is no way in hell she is letting him frown in confusion as he always does when she gets too witty for him.

“By all means, Gordon, continue to speak in tongues and do not explain that Blue Rose riddle to me, I've only been losing my marbles all over the place for a month or so, nothing too inconvenient; and you did warn me about that fair and square when you recruited me on the basis of my ability to slam a door.”

 

Sometimes, let memory serves, pushing Gordon does help getting to the point. From Blue Book to Blue Rose, and to Olympia, because these sorts of things are always better appreciated with a dash of cheap mythological symbolism thrown into the mix, he unwinds his weird story. And after all her musings, she's not even that surprised, except for the fact that she actually dared hoping for some substantial explanation.

“You didn't answer my question though, don't think I haven't noticed,” she says eventually, accepting to open her eyes again. “Where do those words come from? I know a guilty face when I see one, every time, and do you know how I do it? Because it's always yours, Gordon.”

He puts a hand on her shoulder, and begins to intermittently squeeze it, in a way that should make her cringe but doesn't; he has a free pass for a couple of things, and affectionate touches are unfortunately part of it, as she discovered when she worked for him. Once or twice, she even found herself in the impossibility of refusing Gordon Cole a hug; that's something she tries to forget, though, because she's currently dealing with enough traumatic material.

“Isabelle told you her piece about “the best of all possible worlds”, didn't she? She's very fixated on this. I'm not sure I agree with her on that one, but that's the big idea you're looking for. Possibilities. Things that will come to be. Things that may come to be. Or things that are happening, elsewhere, in other possible worlds.”

Oh. It's almost disappointing to discover she was not that far from the truth, or whatever this is called. Nervously, she tugs on a lock of hair, allowing her fidgety fingers to find comfort in the sheer unnatural greenness she put there, for herself, to keep safe from unwanted emotions.

“Okay,” she whispers after a while. “But how do we tell which is which? It's not the same thing, being able to hear the future, or useless mumbo jumbo that is happening to… other people… who are also us? Different Gordon, different Diane, different fucking songs playing on the morning radio, and a different sky… Sorry, I feel a bit dizzy, do you mind if I smoke here?”

Before he can actually answer, she retrieves a cigarette from her bag; it's one of Emma's, those she used for her game with Cooper, thin and dainty, but right now she'd smoke a spring roll if she had to.

“It suits you,” Gordon comments, a bit too seriously to her liking.

“I hope don't mean anything by that, because those are fake as hell, and snooty too.”

Mysteriously, that elicits a quicker response from him than anything she has said before.

“You cannot say which is which, Diane, because _it hasn't been decided_ _yet_. That's the trick with possibilities, you see? Anything can still happen. Somebody still has to say those words you heard in Limerick.”

What he's telling her, in short, is that she ended up with the most disturbing yet completely useless talent that one could ever wish for; it's just typical. Matches will have to do, she decides, still rummaging for a lighter, and the trembling flame she produces seems to take Gordon entirely by surprise.

“Why didn't you ask me for a l… Never mind. Just don't throw that on the floor, please.”

Smoking is only one way to regain control over your breathing, after all, shitty coping mechanism or not. She blows an aggressive cloud of smoke in his face.

“What about you, Gordon? You hear things too, right? Is that what the earplugs are for? Because as much as I like my initial theory of you constantly listening to soft jazz instead of paying any actual attention to the outer world's chaos, I'm forced to acknowledge the fact that you were the one to play tricks with my ears in the first place. So, without further ado: did you contaminate me?”

She shook him up a bit, she can see that; it's not a confession exactly, but it's clear enough he doesn't feel completely innocent regarding her newfound power. In some ways, she hopes it's him; someone must be responsible for it, it cannot be an accident.

“Oh come on, Diane, we're not talking about the flu here, this is serious business! You are where you need to be, hearing what you need to hear, would be my official position on the subject. My part in all this is a very different one.”

He's becoming agitated now, and she turns away from his frown, bending down a bit to drag on her cigarette like an apnea champion. She's going to kill this small thing in no more than two minutes, if she doesn't pace it. Abruptly, her free hand is in the air, and she all but yell at him:

“And me, Gordon? What's my part in all this? How does this work? Won't you at least give me a damn hint?”

She's almost shocked by how desperate she sounds. Gordon has taken his head in his hands and is pushing them through his perfectly styled hair. He's not old, she reminds herself; no more than a few years at the head of this Department, and yet, already graying at the temples, probably from constantly getting grilled by people like her because he's more secretive than a triple agent playing truth or dare on the Iron Curtain. After a while he looks back at her and say slowly:

“Do you see those professional crying women, the ones they have for funerals in Greece or India?”

This was probably her own fault for asking, of course. She shoots him a dirty look that say the analogy better be justified.

“They're not really sad, mind you, most of the time they've never seen the dead guy before, but they bear the pain of others and they channel it in such an intense way… The pain is real, that much is certain, it is there, but because they are here, people don't have to watch themselves crying, they don't have to mind their own reactions. These women just give them that over-the-top rendition of their feelings, although it's never over-the-top because it's the pain of loss. And sometimes, from seeing them, you actually feel it alleviate the suffering, as if you'd pass the burden to somebody else. And sometimes, by watching them you just make yourself cry some more but it's fine because you're crying together and they're always crying louder than you are so nobody minds. You're like that, I think.”

It's not often that she finds herself speechless, but now seems a good time to be.

“...crying in the place of others? Gordon, I swear to God...”

His hand wraps around her wrist, as if to keep her with him, to force her to follow his twisted logic. “This is important”, the pressing fingers say. “Listen”.

“Majors events, strong emotions, they echo all over the place, through time and space, even through dimensions,” he explains with a vibrant look. “Little traumas in the fabric of the universe. And you could say, I guess, they need to be heard, to be repeated, formulated again. Sometimes, it's like a warning, something that can be avoided. Sometimes it's just that something is so big it has to find its way to every level of reality there is. And occasionally, that channel is you, Diane. You're a good listener. You must always have been.”

Her mother, singing the alphabet to her when she was no more than four. She was an early reader. Poems her eighth grade teacher read them, each and every one of them; she remembers. She remembers the pain she heard in her grandmother's voice, when she knew she was dying, that little acid note that pierced through the syllables. And Jane, Jane, Jane. Who was always talking, always crying, “What if I want kids? How can you have a problem with that?”. Familiar voices, haunting her more and more these days. Gordon seems almost sad now, she really ought to say something.

“Channeling, then? I'm channeling events. That is what I do. Right. Fuck.”

She supposed she's allowed to go a bit off track, trying not to picture herself as a giant loudspeaker, and to convince herself that this was not a metaphorical explanation.

“Yeah. Phillip would probably say you're a “strong receiver” or something, but I like the Greek mourners thingy much better.”

“So you're telling me that, in addition to my own emotions, I have to deal with the grief and exhilaration of the entire universe? That sounds like a spectacular add for a new drug, Gordon. How would I even make the difference between the two, know my own stuff from what comes from others?”

She's not even good with emotions; she cannot blush properly and her mascara is no more waterproof than it was a minute ago, so those waves of foreign sadness will have to find another passage. The idea that her own feelings could get mixed up with an exterior influence is terrifying.

“Don't worry about it, kiddo. From what I know it's rarely a direct phenomenon, more like...shock waves from distant events. A different quality of sad, of happy. And most of the time it's only noise, or words, without the emotional charge.”

This makes her take a good look at him, without any of the previous anger or annoyance; only a plain, bare look, to decide if he's being honest with her.

“I take you speak from experience, right?”

Gordon nods, and she detects a hint of shame in the way his head bends, just a little too much.

“Although, to be fair, I don't think emotions are purely one's own, and that's from a guy who lives mostly in his head, so...”

She chuckles a bit, incredulously. What a mess. The worse part is she gets the feeling they are almost done, and there is still so much she doesn't understand; but that is the Blue Rose way, to be sure, walking on tightropes over mysteries, hoping not to get swallowed.

Gordon places his palms on her hands again, trying to get her full attention.

“Diane, as your boss, I have a few questions for you regarding the episodes you had. I need to know if, in addition to the sounds, you were able to see anything, anything at all.”

Two men, kissing, killing each other, framed by a door. But she knows for certain this was an accident, not something she was meant to see; two possibilities for other eyes. Apart from that, she's blind. That is a feeling she experienced elsewhere, in the tapes, being able to hear but not to see, and it is not a pleasant one, but she isn't sure she actually wants to see the images that come with the sounds. She shakes her head.

“Great.” The relief in his voice is hard to miss.

“Do you? See things?” she asks, frowning.

“Some does. But logically you won't. Another thing,” he adds before she has the opportunity to comment on his choice of words, “do you ever hear music instead of sounds, or words? Something that you would like to dance to, maybe?”

His grip has tightened over her hands, as if he was urging her to trust him, his eyes somehow already sad for the unavoidable confession.

“Gordon, I'm always dancing. You know that. For God's sake, sometimes you even ask me to.”

“I'm not talking about your usual “dance out both of my shoes” music. Have you ever heard some old-fashioned tune, traditional, coming out of nowhere, and wanted to dance? I'm sorry Diane but this is very important.”

The only thing that she can hear right now is Jeffries' voice, in a flash, swaying to the notes of “The Electrician”: “ _N_ _ever let them tell you you're not allowed to dance to the same old songs._ _You have a right to dance_.”

Outdated songs get stuck in her head, when she stays around Cooper too much; but it was never like that. No, not like that. She shakes her head again, and this time she can see a flicker of doubt in Gordon's blue eyes.

“Are we done? Am I good for service? Because I've got some questions of my own, _chief_.”

And now she understands the constant derision in Jeffries' voice, whenever he talked to Cole.

“Only because the universe suddenly decided to come whispering in my ear, does it mean I have an obligation to report to you? I don't recall seeing anything of the kind in the small lines of that contract I signed, you know, for secretarial duties.”

She's treading on dangerous ground, the tricky steps of hierarchy less clear cut than they seemed a year ago; but then again, Jeffries can sneer all he wants, complains to subordinates, and Earle gather all the pawns he's able to, she has the feeling that in the end, everything comes back to Gordon. Inevitably. Someone has to make the choices.

“Diane, you must realize I'm looking for everyone's best interest here; we're all in this together, as the old saying goes, and if we want to learn anything from Blue Rose phenomena, it won't be on a solo breakaway. You have buddies here, and you'd be accomplishing one hell of a task. That being said, you're very right, and I'm more than happy to respect your inner sanctum. But you should ask yourself: do you really want to deal with this alone?”

The bastard. All the right cards in all the right places, and that innocuous face of his again. Clenching her fists, she says the first thing that comes to her she thinks will erase it.

“Well I don't know, the team doesn't seem to do so good for itself. What about Jeffries? What happened to him? He leads the task force, but on the few occasions I saw him it felt more like he was being led by it. And in Limerick, he did seem to be on a solo breakaway, so you tell me.”

She has to make sure she did not, in fact, literally punched Gordon in the stomach, because she's never seen him so hurt. Or maybe she did, once; twice? Was it in the car, on their way back, or before that, when she first saw them kiss, or maybe even in his office, at an undetermined point, whenever Jeffries looked at him straight in the eyes, so bitter. It's Pam all over again, same round blue iris, same innocence, same obsolete enthusiasm, albeit expressed in a different style. Why does she keep pushing people around without knowing if they might trip on something in the process? (“As long as you've got the satisfaction of a good barb and the moral high ground, you just don't give a rat's ass, don't you?” This was the trouble with Jane; despite everything, she was rarely wrong.)

“Phillip...Phillip is something else.” She tries to memorize his exact expression, to record every line and every worried crease of his brow: this is Gordon being the most honest he will ever be, and she needs to archive that image preciously, while he passes his hand over his face as if to wash it away.

“He knows how to… You listen, but he, he's a traveler. He finds the tears, the gaps in the veil. And they call him, too. But sometimes he loses himself.”

After that he stays silent for a long moment, his palms pressed against each other while she lights another cigarette, a regular one this time, and watches as the smoke rises toward the dark plastic dome, trying to ignore how close to praying they both are, in their own way.

Finally, he turns to her:

“Do you remember that tale I told you, months ago? About knowing who was in the bed?”

She nods. The red riding hood lesson is not one she is eager to put to use.

“That is the capital question you need to ask yourself here, every time. This is the best team I've ever known and yet, you need to ask yourself, and stay on your guards. You'll always remember who you used to have at your side; but you never really know who you'll end up with.”

Maintaining her attention on the ceiling, never looking down, may be a spectacular idea right now. The smoke is forming a strange blanket, under the ugly ribbed vault of the chapel, a white mist that seems too thick, or is it because she feels like crying all of a sudden, wondering if Gordon isn't doing exactly the same, staring at his feet and hating himself.

“But how,” she says after a silence, immediately clearing her throat, startled by how hoarse she sounds right now, “how do I prevent Cooper from looking at me like I'm magical, or cursed?”

His hands were trembling on her waist, that day, when he tried to make her come back to her senses; she remembers it now. It's good that there's no need to explain; they can share that, and she cherishes it, cherishes the fact that Gordon understands, and won't ask questions. He only smiles, Gordon's sorriest smile, one she saw countless times, the smile of someone who was carrying too heavy a burden.

“Penguin jokes,” he offers faintly, honestly again, and her heart breaks as she smiles back to the miserable man in too big a suit.

***

 

When she comes back to the office, she finds Cooper examining the strain of lipstick on his mug with a strange expression. There is a bitten apple sitting on her desk, a perfect, green apple with a white hole in its exact center, and she pales when she catches sight of it. Cooper is immediately by her side, fingers wrapped around her biceps, his thumbs drawing slow circles on the tender inside of her elbows, probably afraid she will faint again. He doesn't ask if she's okay, but his hands brush up to her shoulders and his brow bends toward hers when he says, almost sternly:

“You had someone over for tea?”

It's difficult to face him, to deal with his gentleness, with how well he knows her; her chest is so heavy as she tries not to let him feel her distress by breathing too quickly against his cheek. She mentally curses his perpetual omniscience, and the way their foreheads almost touch, his eyes searching for hers.

Maybe that is why she does it – lies to get rid of the weight of his concern. Or maybe it's Gordon's words, echoing in her mind, such a good listener. But at the end of the day, it's one more mystery to add to the Blue Rose's files, when she gently pushes him back, eyes cast, and says in the traditional tone of the Perfect Secretary:

“Caroline called again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is barely edited because my surrounding was so noisy but I wanted to update so badly... So bear with me.  
> I lie to keep things a bit blurry, but if you want something more clear-cut or have question, please tell me. Although we should get more information from Jeffries's version of that conversation, in a couple of chapters or so (maybe later, I also have to keep that slow-burn going. I don't seem to be able to decide if I want to write an "expand the mythology" kind of fic, or a romantic one. Let's go for a 150,000 words long take on both.)  
> And as always, if you want to chat or see content about Diane, Twin Peaks, and so on, you can always come and visit me on Tumblr @imagine-the-fanfiction


	10. Esprit de corps

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The FBI requires all five senses, and more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh God it's been so long and I'm so sorry. In short, too much work and probably too much ambition with this story, since it's clearly becoming more and more complex. It's still a slow-burn, but in the next chapter we will be plotting a bit more. For now, let's talk about Diane and found families. 
> 
> In this chapter you'll find :  
> Something warm.   
> Something all ears and eyes.  
> Something psychedelic.   
> Something chivalrous.   
> Something, but not a slow.  
> Something gifted.

 

Comes the point at which she cannot keep on inventing phone calls to distract Cooper from her metamorphosis into the parent radio station of the universe. Nevertheless, she must have accidentally pleased some minor deity – the one for sass, or possibly fashion risk, although a demon of dance is just as likely. Suffice it to say Holy Martini Saint of Organized Secretaries was apparently watching out for her when she finally tells Cooper about her chapel intermission. She could swear there are actual stars in his eyes as he states, looking at her as if her whole existence made sense, as if her weirdness was an achievement:

“You really are something, aren't you Diane?”

Then, because it is Cooper, he lifts her hand above her head and makes her twirl, once, a small ritual of celebration that leaves her on the verge of vertigo.

From then, she gets better.

*

After a few days, she understands why he looks so relieved. This is when she learns about his mother.

They are standing against some brick wall on the rooftop of the office building, a stack she knows courtesy of Gordon and visits on sunny days. It's 6 in the afternoon, but the bricks are still warm, and thanks God at least here there's a breeze, so they don't have to choke on her cigarette smoke. She doesn't get why Cooper followed through; he doesn't do smoking breaks, not that really matters. It's nice, she thinks as she closes her eyes, savoring the orange hue settling behind her lids. She could get used to that.

As she takes another drag, she hears him say:

“My mother used to see things, you know.”

She doesn't dare moving, afraid the subject will dissipate into thin air if she shows too much of a reaction. He mentioned his mother from time to time, in the tapes, and she had opened a hopeful sub-file in her personal record when she first heard “My mother said that dreams were the conversation our souls kept with our brain, like a friendly touch across consciousness”. But those were always indirect talks, matters he never addressed face to face. It was the distance, she supposed, inviting to confessions; and the voice in the ventilator planted an idea that day she had trouble forgetting. _All of your secrets, straight to the recorder, the naked ones_. It was easier, talking to a machine, and it was possible that Cooper forgot, too, she was actually listening. Forgot she was there. So he kept telling her things he never mentioned again, as if she were a silent device, a sort of tomb.

“Tell me,” she says softly, finally opening her eyes to lean against the security ramp as the words fly away with smoke in the afternoon breeze. It's a comfortable scenery, not quite a sunset yet, the receding light only coloring them with a glowing tan. She feels him settling by her side, his forearm pressing against hers; he rolled his sleeves, she realizes, but does not start at the contact of skin against skin. It's summer. They are allowed to breathe a little and to forget, for a while, to follow her rules.

The cigarette dances between her fingers as he looks down, the pale skin of his face pinkish in the sun, that of a young, flushed boy, good-heartedly embarrassed about everything.

“From what I can remember, she had these, I think you can call them “visions”. Of animals, mostly. She liked to talk about tall horses, and owls. I was a scout, as you know, so at first it seemed quite normal to me; I liked animals too. But my father...”

That is not a pause that calls for completion, but she offers nonetheless, because she just knows, remembers when he forgets how much he already told her. No, not her. Told the recorder.

“He thought she needed help. Eventually, at least.”

Cooper lets out a long sigh. If he was smoking, he would breathe out elegant clouds, but as it is, he probably inhales most of her own cigarette – it's a wrong wind, or wrong postures and he shouldn't, anyway, be so close to her – and it only makes her long earring, a glorious red plastic parrot, jingle lazily against her neck like a wind chime.

“Did she, though? Need help?” she asks, with the earnest curiosity of someone who's been experiencing unnatural perceptions without being offered more medical help than a glass of Gordon's second-best brandy, whose secret hiding stack she forgot in the momentum. A real shame, since the old rascal isn't all that generous with his personal booze.

“Maybe. I don't know, I prefer to think of it as a different way to look at the world. She had a sort of motto, something she was always saying whenever we talked about polar opposites. “Two rooms of the same house,” I think it was. Everything was always part of the same house, with her, opposites ultimately connected through the long way round.”

“She wasn't wrong. I mean, look at us looneys, all packed up in the very building good citizen are told to regard as the home of rational method, thinking we can solve cases by spying on parallel realities. It's all test tubes and magical hats. Different rooms, same house.”

He turns to smile at her, a boyish grin that makes her more aware of the naked arm against her own. _All of my secrets. The naked ones_. She will have to shush her brain soon.

“That was some quality analysis, Diane. I'm glad the FBI can count on your critical thinking.”

“You and I both know I always was the brain of this operation,” she takes the trouble to wink at him, putting her blue liner to good use for once. “After all, you're only the town's second-best detective.”

To be pushed, playfully, by Special Agent Dale Cooper is not something she originally expected to get out of this job, but she'll take it. He can do it some more; unlike most of her contemporaries, she enjoys being pushed.

“Pardon me agent, but that wasn't a very zen move.” There comes her predatory smile, because she's been too easy on him lately. One should always tease Cooper. God knows he needs to get rid of all that seriousness anchoring him down.

But as usual, he ruins the mood with a surge of gentleness that makes her eyes burn, although she cannot tell with certainty if the sad tinge she feels in the gesture comes from him or from her own messed-up heart. Fight me, she wants to say. We can banter and I can win, you'll be caught off guard at some point no doubt, and I will press the advantage, reach toward the edge without actually losing balance, touch, make you blush and you will change the subject, make a comment that will even things out and we'll be fine; we'll have coffee and talk, we'll enjoy it, I just know we will, love, comfortable and fuzzy, I swear, as it should be. Don't be too nice to me. Dance with me and always, always let me go. This doesn't have to be a tragedy.

She might be tired, the heat weighting on her. She doesn't even recognize her own thoughts.

Cooper has seized the tips of her fingers in his hand, and as he examines her nails, pink, silver and white, she hears the strange noises Lil did when she visited, tapping on the polish surface as if they were button, activating some kind of mysterious device inside Diane's body.

“I've always wonder,” he says like someone who is eager to get as far from the original subject as he can,“do the colors mean anything? You've changed them with your hair; are they supposed to signify...”

She laughs a cloud of smoke in his face and smirks.

“Aren't you just tired of trying to figure me out?”

“It's just that... no, no but hear me out: I can figure a lot of things, I think you'll agree, but I never could account for the color patterns. I've got the feeling they make sense to you, and it sure is a statement, so...”

“Yeah? Good. I'll let you on your toes, wondering. Come on, you've done enough field work on this one as it is,” she waves her fingers in front of her face to indicate her body isn't open for questions. “Say what you want to say, Coop. I'm here. I won't bite.” Well she probably will, but he's used to it.

He leans more heavily on the ramp, grave, almost afraid.

“I may be seeing things too.”

“What kind?” she says after a beat, surprised at her lack of surprise, since after all, after all… Cooper is an obvious choice for such absurdities.

“It's hard to explain. Nothing too unusual but sometimes...images, like clues. Faces. Trees. Highways in the dark.”

“But when?”

“From time to time. In my sleep.”

She saw him sleep exactly once, only a few weeks ago; the heat was unbearable and Gordon had just sent him on a ridiculous day-trip, somewhere mountainous? she doesn't even remember. Late in the afternoon, coming back from an HR crisis where someone had had the mischievous idea to call her for mediation, she found him laying across the carpeting, very still, sound asleep. She thought he was dead. By the time she realized her mistake, she was still too distressed to try anything funny, like putting paper clips in his hair, or drawing him a bright yellow highlighter smile, and she just stood there stupidly, as the daylight faded, wishing for his eyelids to move, the tiniest bit, and oddly contemplating the possibility that she might, someday, forget his face, but never, ever his voice.

“Those are called dreams, Coop,” she says softly.

“Not when it's real. And lately...” he looks at her with something like guilt, before turning away, “when I'm awake, too. Working cases and such. Not very often but it...it does happen.”

Worry in his eyes, on his brow again, or maybe something else, that she cannot pinpoint and makes her want to caress his cheek and to rest her little finger on the dimple of his chin. She doesn't do that. Instead, she shakes her head, the parrots chanting in the air almost imperceptibly, and takes a final drag from an already tired cigarette. She smokes too much these days, more and more; even Cooper noticed.

“You know, at the rate these things are going, I wonder when we should expect Albert to sprout demon wings or, God forbids, Desmond to read minds.” And then, pushing her shoulder lightly against his, voice even, “it's okay. We'll figure it out, probably. Some day, together. In the meantime, you may want to have another conversation with an annoying man-child.” As much as she wants to reassure him, she can't keep Gordon's words from echoing in her mind, _who's that in the bed, who's that, because you know who you get, but you never know who you'll end up with_. Fuck. No. Sensing her pulse quicken, and her stomach drop a bit, she adds, trying to keep her voice from shaking,

“But Coop? Do me a favor.”

“Anything,” he answers, and it's not as if she can explains it's for herself she worries, and that it doesn't change a thing if he can see what others cannot, because deep down she was already convinced he could, but he _means_ this, and she must not let herself think about that fact.

“Don't listen to him too much.”

He looks at her curiously, but  say nothing. After a while, feeling calmer, she allows herself  a half-smile, soft, endearing :

“I don't mind being cursed as long as you are too. At least now I know it's not a karma thing.”

The joke that is more serious than she would like to admit, and he doesn't really laugh, only tilts his head once more, smiling but leaving his eyes out of the deal like someone who is afraid to bargain everything at once.

“I'm afraid I don't exactly have the perfect track record you're crediting me with, Diane.”

“By my standards, I think you have; they're not that high, let me tell you.”

The sun is really setting now; it's always a surprisingly quick affair, she should know better, but since he cannot really see her, focused as he is on the purple clouds accumulating on the horizon, his jaw a bit set, she lets herself observe the reddish glow of his skin, the way his cheeks color slightly under this light, and how he's suddenly all black, red and white like those fair ladies of the tales who constantly sleep and bleed over snow.

Sometimes she gets scared when she has him all to herself for too long. Of the things she could do.

“Are you cold?”

It's such a warm evening, it makes no sense for her to be shivering like that all of a sudden, an icy feeling spreading quickly in her throat, yet she has no real explanation to offer, so she says faintly:

“Yes. A bit.”

  
***  


And just like this – part of her will always hate Gordon, Jeffries, God, whoever she indistinctly supposes to be in charge, and some days it's Isabelle – they get back to work. Another Dale and another Diane. The eyes and ears of the fucking FBI.

Strangely, things are normal. Things are strangely normal, the situation finally blooming into what it was supposed to be ever since she glanced at an elliptic, badly-typed ad in the _Inquirer_ while doing the crosswords in a Martini-induced fit of puzzle-solving. So she eats her apples and she types her reports. Sometimes, Gordon makes her jump out of her skin, stopping by to take her, and sometimes both of them, to seemingly random destinations. Once it's a morgue in Boston. Another time, it's under a tree, in some folk's front-yard in fucking Missoula, and the owner is very disturbed by having the “chief of the FBI”, as Gordon introduces himself to supposedly save time, beginning to weep under his willow as she repeats “I don't wanna go”, the words echoing in her head, over and over. There is the time they drive for two days and end up in a desert she cannot even name, having lost interest after the first two hundred miles of asking and retreated behind her sunglasses to mutter unpleasant things about creepy motels and the Bureau's surreal stinginess when it came to its employees' well-being. At least Cooper is here to knock in Morse against the partition between their exiguous rooms, “of course he knows where he's going, you should sleep”,“do you have an extra pair of earplug by any chance?” and yes, she does because she always keep emergency supplies in her desk. He is here too to hold her hand when finally, caught in a cloud of dust and sand away from any road, facing nothing, she hears

_Asparagus for dinner again. I hate asparagus. Does this mean I'll never grow up?_

_*_

Once, Desmond comes with them. Nothing will be spared to her, it would seem. She's half-convinced it's because of him she's unable to hear much more than TV static and a bang in an abandoned parking lot.

*

The voices are clearer now. Girls, mostly. In fact, those are almost exclusively women' voices. At nights, she dreams of sounds sometimes, wind gushing through high trees. Pine trees. She got quite good at identifying what she cannot see, and though she always considered synesthesia the invention of a very high connoisseur of psychedelics from the beginning of the decade, sometimes she would swear she can almost smell them.

*

She still dates a lot, but begins to go the movies alone at night, in old, cramped theaters behind forgotten alleys, losing herself in the scent of cold tobacco and burnt corn while the shades of black and white oldies reverberate on her face. Silent movies. She couldn't explain why, but she needs them now. The perfect, smooth ladies with painted eyebrows smile at her with consistency through the screen, and she's the only one in the room.

*

It is as if all the distance she cultivated in the beginning, when everything hurt and angered her, is slowly being absorbed, to convince her she truly belongs. A defense mechanism emanating from the FBI, which was never too good with accepting constructive criticism, for sure. Things are normal now. Cooper smiles at her from the other side of the room and begins to tell her of a dream he had, of a strange castle by the sea. Things are pretty normal.

***

  
Winter is back before she even knows it, her summer long gone, but it's okay since the phone in their office rings less frequently, and she doesn't need to smoke as much for there are less things that burn. When her birthday comes again, she wonders for the first time in her life if she should feel older now, grown up, and then shrugs it off to apply more purple glitter to her lids and lips, confused as to where that thought might have even come from.

“You're going to the party tonight, right?” someone asks her as she crosses the lobby, carrying out armfuls of dead marigolds from a guy whose name she simply cannot remember.

“As soon as I've put these on the grave of our democracy.”

It's the end of 1980, and she knows she's being dramatic but hell, dozen of fights in the last few months and colleagues still try to make her join the toasts everybody is giving those days in the honor of “a new era for the FBI”. It's mostly force of habit speaking though, even a whole army of Republican enthusiasts wouldn't prevent her from attending what is after all on the verge of becoming, by personal decree, her party.

**

They probably did unholy things to the room, because entering it is like walking straight into a sick cloud, the transition with the boring cream corridors much too brutal to her taste. Used to it as she is, but always in different contexts, the flickering spotlights hurt her eyes a bit, and she tries to breathe. Whoever is in charge of the Christmas party now clearly had their heart set on a more upbeat atmosphere than last year. There's only two colors, yellow and green, sharply separated, clashing even, and damn if it isn't a party designed especially for her, she's ready to be burned on the dance floor like the witch she probably is. Last year was an old-fashioned romance movie; this year feels more like a mescalin induced firework. There is no way in hell anyone can dance to Pink Floyd; and yet, here she is, not even 10 pm, furiously in love with the madman responsible for the playlist who thought “Time” was the perfect song to warm up the audience. She's so focused on climbing her way up to another dimension, virtually alone under the lights, that she hasn't even inspected the content of the bar yet—but for the sake of coherence, she'd bet on mescal and absinthe, something dizzying and enough of a knock out to make the feds dissolve in the background.

She bought a golden spangle dress in a thrift store earlier this week, that feels as if it had been body-painted on her like some trendy art experiment—except she can certify it hasn't; she changed in the restrooms after work, banging her head in the cabin more than once, when her elbow refuses to cooperate, sequins getting caught in her underwear, because she wanted to ask Cooper to close his door and not look through the panel for five minutes, but it was late and she lost her nerve. Like last year, he asked her for a tie knot, and she laughed at him for not taking the trouble to learn, while he stayed silent and looked down at her silver nail, pressed against the crook of his neck as she arranged a piece of silk with a delicate twist before slowly tightening it around his throat. She probably joked about it becoming an unhealthy habit, what if she loses control and strangles him after one too many judiciary anecdotes, but he didn't comment.

“So I gather they paid you good money to wear this thing, stand under the only spot and turn on yourself slowly for the whole party? I thought we had actual budget for those, enough for a cheap mirror ball at least.”

She smiles without taking the trouble of opening her eyes, twirls one last time and catches herself where she knows the grumpy form of Albert Rosenfield must stand. If the motion sets him a bit off balance, he certainly doesn't let it show, acidly calling her names that would be those of famous figure skaters, not that she knows anything about sports, or even listen. It's been more than six months, six months wandering in the desert or waiting under ominous trees, and she still hasn't talk to Albert. She can't. When she tried, after he casually mentioned he recommended her to Gordon as backup on some of Cooper's missions, it suddenly became all too obvious he didn't know what Blue Rose really was for. She was looking at him closely, as she is now, hanging to the lapels of his jacket for support, and she had just ask him for another round of drinks in the lounge they favor for these things.

“Only if you promise me you won't sing. Again.” he had said, overacting exhaustion.

“I won't sing.” After all, her fifth Martini was at stake.

“Your life is not an ABBA song.”

“My life is not an ABBA song. Although...”

“Diane.”

He must have known the look on his face was hilarious; if she had learned one thing about Albert, it was that he was watching himself constantly, controlling his effects like a professional.

“Alright, alright. Hell, you're no fun at all.”

It was then, looking into his eyes, she had suddenly known why Gordon hadn't told him anything. Albert's gaze, despite the complex layers of irony, stiff distance and probable self-loathing, is incredibly sharp, achingly clear. They will need someone who'll be able to look at the crazy conundrum of Blue Rose with the edge of a rational mind, when the times comes. They need an outsider. And so, because it's the one reasonable thing to do, no matter how cruel, she doesn't tell him. The thought of watching Albert, of all people, having to make sense of talking ventilators and whispering trees is simply too much.

“Is your dance card filled up yet?”

The question brings her back to more pragmatic matters; they discussed this with Cooper earlier, and they had some brilliant ideas.

“Well, I swore to dance the last one with any decent cop, so I guess I'll probably die of exhaustion after a ten hours marathon of Cream.”

“Should I fetch Cooper, if only to save your pitiful life?”

“I'll be fine, thanks. Anyway, ain't it your time to finally shine? We decided this was the year we finally get Albert Rosenfield to dance. You are doomed, doc.”

He side-glances at her in a way that is not as flattering as she would like it to be.

“I wish that I could shimmy like my sister Kate.”

“There is alcohol, Albert. Virtually anyone can.”

To prove her point, she sets about having a drink every time he refuses her invitations, which is...a certain amount, for sure, given that she drinks twice from the moment Cooper enters the competition and tries to get him to the dancefloor too, a move that, for some reason, seems to fluster him even more than her own attempts. Unsurprisingly, she ends up in a terrific mood. At one point, it's possible that she climbs on a table and loudly declares her undying love to whoever arranged this particular party, skin itching from so much blinking light, heart almost as full as her glass. Cooper helps her getting down, and—did he carry her? He must have, she wasn't very keen on walking then, well she remembers hearing him say it was more than time for their own dance this year. This is when she embarks on a complex sentence involving the words “friendship” and “funk” (at least she hopes she said “funk”. Otherwise, she may be in trouble) that results in them dancing cheek to cheek, or rather back to back to the sound of “Do it any way you wanna”. The next morning, fresh as the breeze, she will hate herself for not staying more sober because she would give almost anything to have more detailed memories of Special Agent Dale Cooper, wriggling to some Philly hit like his life depends on it. This is the funniest thing she has ever seen and she tells him so multiple times between fits of laughter, losing control of her breath as he sways his hips in an exaggerate way, probably sending the whole room in a lather. As she gets hold of a pillar to regain her composure, tears of mirth in her eyes, Albert materializes by her side.

“God I've missed this. We should party more. We should party all the time. Abandon all pretend of work and stay here, in this room, dancing until the end of time. I'm pretty sure we would do less damage.”

“Normally, I would ignore that as most things you say,” he comments with a serious look, “but I really have to ask how you call what you just did to Cooper's public image, because to me it looked like some massive damage.”

He obviously wants to laugh too, so she indulges him and does it for both of them.

“Don't make me ask you to dance again, I can't drink anymore. Please, Albert. You have to dance. Look at all the good it did tonight.”

Out of nowhere, she hears a solemn, unknown voice, and for a second she believes she is channeling again, but judging by Albert's exasperated expression, the words are no hallucination.

“I'll dance for you if you need me, boss. So that you won't have to. I'm not afraid.”

The man who spoke is one of Albert's minions, a standard guy in a black suit who, unbelievably, still wears his sunglasses. As they stand in a skeptical silence, he suddenly breaks into the weirdest moves she's ever witnessed, keeping his eyes on Albert's face as if to demonstrate he can easily take his place and release him from the burden of dancing.

“Christ, this is actually sobering,” she says after a moment of watching the man throwing his arms and legs in opposite directions as if wanting to get rid of them.

Albert sighs deeply.

“That's Clark. He...always does that, no matter how much I insult him for it. Lights my cigarettes, too. Never gets rid of that suit. Don't ask me, I have no answers. It's like having an OCD dog who's been to college.”

“Wait. Wait,” she stumbles a bit on her feet and grasps his forearm – not that sober yet, then – “it was the _same guy all along_? I've always thought all your team did that for you, for some twisted lab cult-related reason. How do you tell them apart, it's beyond me.”

Although, now that she takes her time to have a real look at Clark, she has to admit he is rather handsome, in his weird, innocent way.

“This is all very chivalrous,” she offers lazily, “but I think he may end up hurting someone. Possibly himself.”

“I should have fired him long ago. But he...it's not...”

There is something wrong about this conversation, her alcohol-infused brain finally tells her. Albert Rosenfield always finishes his sentences; in fact, he crafts them carefully before delivering them, and they all hit their target, invariably. She tilts her head.

“Do you want to dance with him?”

She remembers he used to have nervous ticks whenever he was forced to talk to Isabelle for too long; but they were different from the twitch in his jaw she's seeing now. He never gave too long a look to Isabelle either. Oh boy. She is so mad at herself right now. To think she resented Cooper for assuming she only dated men.

“What?” he says, and there's something like fear in his voice. Albert never drinks at parties. She is a fucking excuse for a friend.

The music is much slower now, the lights a bit less epileptic than thirty minutes ago. The moment in the night is probably equivalent to the one she shared with Cooper last year, at least in the head of the  impossible lunatic they've been assigned for a DJ.  She can see how this would be a problem, how this would be impossible, in front of so many people, colleagues, for Albert to dance alone with another man. Another peculiar, strangely devoted man. 

Well fuck them all. And fuck the defective curve of social progress, she had almost forgotten how things really were here, used as she had become to uncharted phenomena. She has been distracted again. Fuck ventilators, who cares about unknown voices when Albert cannot even dance with Clark.

“You know what? I'll be right back.”

*

Anger has always given her her best ideas; and that's probably why she walks decidedly to  the corner where Pam has been starring longingly at the dancing couple s from her plastic chair, small and hunched up in her  sensible pink dress.  H er blue eyes get even rounder as the inappropriateness of what she is offering. 

“But, but I couldn't possibly, this would...”

“You can if you want to,” she smiles as she extends her hand.

Two women, it would be easier; she hates it but it's true, because people are blind as hell but still it's easy, the perfect cover. Pam pliantly follows through, her fingers curling around hers a bit too firmly, as if afraid she would suddenly change her mind and let go. On their way, she brushes against Cooper's shoulder to get his attention and whispers quickly, trying not to slur, her sobriety still more intellectual than physical:

“Get a man to dance with you, anyone. But it has to be a man. Here, ask Desmond, I'm sure the fool will go for it if you make it a dare. It's for Albert.”

Seeing his lost expression – it is a chance she is taking, but she's quite confident Cooper won't have any objection. He's only superficially old-fashioned, a picture of the Good Old American except where it matters. Sadly there is no time for her to watch Desmond's face when he will invite him.  Pam is looking at her with questioning eyes as she leads her next to Clark, but soon the annoyingly slick hair  that is Chet's signature makes an apparition in the corner of her eyes, and she navigates them until they are on both sides of the disastrous dancer, shielding him from public view. Albert is standing very still against  his pillar like it's  the last thing anchoring him to satiny . If she were more functional, now would be a time to tell him that it's okay, to tell him, because it's Albert, that nobody cares. 

*

Technically, this is not a slow. You have the right not to call it that, and n one  of them is clung to their partner, and yet, and yet, it's probably her ears playing tricks, or the alcohol speaking, but – and again,  it's not really a party song, is it? – there is something heartbreaking about hearing the overture of “ Feeling Good”  played at full volume . 

It may be a favor to Albert, or whatever you call a  tequila-advised public act of contrition, but she's never been a girl not to take a dance seriously. In front of her, Pam has turned almost as pink as her dress, embarrassed like a cheating school-girl. And yet, after a while she manages to get in synch with her, despite half-finished gestures and  a general stiffness, and from there she sees her improve, slowly accepting to occupy some space. This is not a slow, no. Rather  a unique occasion, if not an innocent one. She's been meaning to make amends with Pam for so long, never quite managing it.  All they do now is  hav ing  sad, quiet lunches from time to time, not much more, and the guilt comes back to her periodically, like a beating heart. She used her. Used her.  Small Pam, fragile Pam, always flustered, flushed, trembling in various ways as if afraid to breathe, flickering in and out of existence quicker than the party lights, no one taking the trouble  of giving her any ground. There is something intimate in dancing with someone, even like this, she can tell when Albert finally rolls his eyes and accept to leave the comfort of the wall, tentatively moving in rhythm, not with Clark exactly, but towards him, not  even  trying  too hard to make it look as an accident. He may have no intention towards him, other than the present one, but i t is enough. It's been more than two years now, and she knows Albert, mostly. Knows he'll never say what he wants anyway. So the least she can do is to offer him options. 

A t the high of Nina Simone's voice, she sees Pam close her eyes and sway, left and right, with a shy smoothness that makes her feel, inexplicably, like the world may be ending  with this first, fleeting moment of serenity. She wants to hug her now, out of guilt  yes , but there is a tenderness too, spreading inside her as she watches those blue eyes open toward the ceiling, taking the lyrics in. In fact, she must have wanted it too much, her body ahead of her brain tonight, and all of a sudden she's squeezing that little frame against her long one like the mess she is, wanting to tell her not to make herself small, and saying nothing.

“I'm sorry. I got carried away,” she muttered, backing off as she comes to her senses.

“No it's...it's okay,” she hears a muffled voice answer, a strange cocktail of awe and fright, nothing like the dizzying mix that shapes the atmosphere of the party as people get more and more intoxicated in the background, but something real, and she feels her hands wrap around Pam's neck, over her hair.

So, maybe it's a slow now, who can tell. First and foremost it is her, holding Pam close, in what should be, if the world was perfect, it it was indeed the best bloody possible world with a cherry pie on top, a comforting embrace, a motherly contact with a girl who is – and she keeps forgetting, as everyone forgets – almost her age.

“It will be fine now,” she blabbers to herself, barely resisting the impulse to play with the smooth blonde locks under her fingers and the other, different impulse to cry. The song is in its descending phase but all she can hear, whether she imagines it or not, is three notes, low and wistful, slow, the ones she heard in the ventilators' room back in Limerick station. She thinks about the women' voices, all those chocked echoes, and hates herself for not having a solution to offer here. 

She holds Pam's face against her neck, gently, and hope that she is wrong this time, and that there is a way to run Earle's chess-table over instead of sitting at it. They've stopped moving, she realizes, although her partner has made no real effort to escape her grip so far.

“Come on Sue Ellen, stop terrifying the staff,” even Albert's cynical voice seems a bit unsure about the nature of the scene he is witnessing, or maybe still a bit shaken from the absurd setting-up he found himself trapped in.

Finally, Pam moves away from her, decidedly flushed now, and she can almost see her own reflection in her wide eyes: a tall, improbable woman with a shining body, lids heavy with glitter and concern.

“Thanks for the dance,” Pam says in a weak voice, before turning away.

“I think I need a break,” she whispers to no one in particular, hit with a sudden wave of vertigo. Before Cooper can intercept her, mumbling about a glass of water and being back for the last dance, she flees, crossing the crowd without stopping at the first notes of something by the Roches.

She smokes outside for a while. At least she thinks she does; later, she will essentially remember washing her face in the bathroom, again and again, and looking into the mirror while waiting for the moment she will stop hearing the same music playing in her head.

*

When she comes back, she finds herself a chair in a forgotten corner, and sits in the dark, the alcohol catching up with her as she watches the world spin and pitch like a boat in distress. She only needs a minute. People change under the binary spotlights, positives and negatives of a photograph, as they move in a somewhat mechanical way.

Suddenly it's like she never observed the phenomenon before. The light glides on her emerald hair and her golden dress, yellow and green, the colors her colors, and she stays exactly the same, one unique Diane surrounded by an army of twins, doubles, appearing and disappearing with the spots as she stays and observe, until an odd silence descends on the room. The green and yellow strangers all begin to turn slowly and stare at her, stopping their dance as if to ask where has her alter ego gone. As a nauseating fear begin to settle in her stomach, something goes “click” and all the lights come out. In the complete darkness, she can hear her own heart beat in her ears while bodies move around her with an unknown but palpable purpose. She has to come out of here, she has to –

“Happy birthday, Diane.”

As she turns around, she discovers a smug Albert, carrying with some difficulty what looks like a beautifully executed mojito, a single candle precariously planted into a floating half-lime. The wavering flame appears almost magical, seen through the thick glass, and as he presents it to her he says in her ear:

“You sure don't need to have one more, but you know, what the hell.”

People are probably singing now, she's not really paying attention.  Her momentary panic completely forgotten, she looks at Albert, and Cooper, who is standing next to a smiling Pam. Behind them, she can see Isabelle looming in the background, surreal as ever in a cocktail dress and even, yes, Desmond leaning against a table  in his classic “not paying attention” pose . She's never been part of any team before, hated even the concept of it, sneered at proselyte cheerleaders every time she got the chance and even dodged  nice-looking  girls giving out feminist pamphlet s during Orientation Week, although she always found a way to listen to the talks. And it's not so much of a team that they ever acknowledge it in front of anyone else, but it's a nice though to hold, she finds. A team.  As she  raise the glass  to her mouth, she takes a moment to observe the familiar face s , yellow and green, before she blows the candle out. 

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've finally introduced gay!Albert. Tumblr is responsible for my conversation on that subject, although I do like a good Albert/Constance too. Let's just say this is a different possible world ;). I hope you still like this story, and know that the next chapter is written, so we have that. 
> 
> I will assume you all know Pink Floyd, but here is a link to Time if you need a quick background tune for the chapter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwYX52BP2Sk  
> On the other hand, you may not know the funky tune to which I had Dale and Diane dance this time: “Do it any way you wanna” by People's Choice is a hit from Philadelphia's soul scene of the 70s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJlpMD7PH1Q  
> Here's Nina Simone “Feeling Good” too, extremely famous but I never get tired of that intro : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfJRX-8SXOs  
> And I strongly invite you to check the Roches if you don't know them, although I will probably use some of their songs in the rest of the story.


	11. Entomology

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a riddle is told.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What can I say at this point? I'm so sorry. A Tumblr ask reminded me that I still had this chapter mostly done since, what, July? I know. Still, I've decided to post it now to prove my good will, and as an incentive to myself to write the rest. Once again, I know (more or less) where I'm headed. It's just that paradoxical phenomenon when you're so involved into something that it becomes too much pressure? I know it's ridiculous. Anyway, feel free to yell at me (see: it works). 
> 
> On with the story anyway.
> 
> In this chapter you'll find:  
> Something amiss.  
> Something misplaced.  
> Something exposed.  
> Something attentive.  
> Something invisible.  
> Something framed.

 

She's barely out of her bucket of aspirin when Cooper disappears without notice, not three days after the party. Usually she is not one to complain about such things, being after all an independent woman, and one who tends to get irritated by her colleague's tendency to do headstands in his office while enlightening her about sophrology when she's hangovered and cannot tell with certainty the ceiling from the floor. But he never evaporated like this. She barely takes a lunch break, unable as she is to eat anything but soup, and finds the office completely empty when she comes back, his stuff gone too. At first she shrugs if off, but Cooper is prone to leave lengthy notes, or tapes, even when he's only out in town for the day. Actually, he often sends her postcards, fills her voice mail: one memorable time she had to listen, stunned, to a drunk version of an Indian folk song recorded at three in the morning somewhere in Minnesota. This is why she is not longer able to ignore the fact that his singing voice is catastrophic.

On second thoughts – the _modus operandi_ looking typical enough – she decides to go and complain to Gordon's office that he cannot deprive her of her partner without notice, for her whole schedule is upside down now, and frankly how difficult is it to give her a yell when he plans on kidnapping Cooper just when it's his turn to water the bamboo. Isabelle is alone, her back to the door, rummaging into one of the desks, and at the sound of “do you by any chance know where Coop is?” she jumps, which almost makes Diane jump in return. It is not like Isabelle to have such a fallible reaction. The sort of smoothness that coats her every gesture usually prevents any anomaly. Something is definitely wrong. She feels her heartbeat speed up as Isabelle turns to face her.

The normally ethereal woman looks like a ghost, white as a sheet and slightly trembling, her hands gripping the wood as if to break it.

“Oh, it's you”, she says with too neutral a voice, wide-eyed. “Good. There was something I needed you to know. And you came. Those things really do work out well.”

“Isabelle, is there a problem? Where is Coop?”

“He was here ten minutes ago. Agent Earle required his presence on urgent business, out of state, and they left in quite a hurry.”

Earle, then. Fuck. She would frown deeper if the unblinking stare of Isabelle wasn't set on her with what seems like paralyzed panic. Her face is so different that for a moment she isn't even sure she recognizes her.

“What did Earle want? Did he say something to you, something unsettling? Because I swear, Isabelle, you've got to tell Gordon about...”

The other woman cuts her off, another thing the usual, zen Isabelle never did.

“Agent Earle? Oh no, he never comes here. Ever. Agent Cooper did. He had a question.”

This is the moment when she notices Isabelle has let go of the desk and is now clasping and unclasping her hand, her left hand, in the air, flexing it, open and close, while pulling anxiously on one of her fingers.

“A question?”

“Yes,” she says, voice higher than usual. “More of a request, really. He...”

If only she could see distinctly which finger she's so nervously playing with, maybe it would help her understand…

“...he wanted to know if he could _get your picture_.” The words come out of her mouth like she might be sick over them. Despite her effort to control herself, it's clear that the mere thought of Cooper asking for her portrait – in such an old-fashioned way it sounds almost medieval, and in other circumstances she would smile if the whole context wasn't so weird – truly horrifies her.

“What? But what for? And why ask you?”

Although now that she thinks of it, the story is vaguely familiar; they used to joke about something of the kind, dramatically, whenever she went on holidays (Cooper rarely ever did). He complained he would at least need a picture, to cope. Back then she must have explained that there was no way he could have grown so accustomed to her face when he primarily talked to her in her absence, and laughed at his shocked expression when she suggested they had a long-distance relationship.

“I keep a copy of all the employees' files here. And Gordon…as you know, always insisted to have, um, pictures of everyone. He was not direct about it, but he tried, tried to ask me if I could…since, he said, he was leaving suddenly, probably for quite some time...”

It's not her index, that is for sure. Not her thumb either, that would show. Watching her tugging at her hand, in a reflex gesture that is gradually getting more violent, she thinks, curiously, about the time her manicure getting ripped off at the pool. The chemicals they put in the water decided, for obscure reasons, to attack only one nail, that emerged completely naked after two miles of breaststroke, the polish coat left to float away in some forgotten corner. Of course, of course it was the middle finger, and she felt like it had just been cut off. But it's not her middle finger Isabelle is currently pulling at, probably because she's no way near as rude and loud as Diane is.

It's her ring finger.

“You don't have to worry, I would never have agreed to such… I… said you hadn't left any picture with your file. But I can't understand why he would...why would anyone...”

It's like watching a perfect machinery crashing in the ugliest way.

“Isabelle, please, calm down, it's fine! God knows what he had in mind, but it's Coop, he can have my picture all he wants. In fact I bet he keeps photos of half the service because he likes everyone here way too much for his own good.”

Emphasizing the normality of the situation is proving difficult when she simultaneously feels compelled, without reason, to ask Isabelle the same question she asked Lil all those weeks ago, when she saw the wound in the place her tongue should have been.

 

_Who did this to you?_

 

Isabelle takes a deep breath and clenches her fingers into a fist, her face now so serious she is reminded of the time she told her that her anger shall pass one day.

“You must be very careful, Diane. Please. Do not get framed. It happens, sometimes, people getting… framed. My husband...”

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN “THE SEARCH WASN'T AUTHORIZED”? IT'S THE YEAR OF THE METAL MONKEY BUDDY, SO GO BIG OR GO HOME!”

Holy Christ on a fucking bike, there is no logical reason for Gordon to still be able to scare people who's been working for him for so long, but the loud, loud man has a talent for silent approach that probably got people killed. He enters the office in a rush, tipping an imaginary hat to them.

“LADIES.”

After three seconds of sheer astonishment, she finally manages to accuse him:

“Earle took Cooper away. I didn't even get a note!”

She could swear Gordon frowns fleetingly, but then it's gone and replaced by his usual out of touch expression as he waves her concern away:

“HE DID, DIDN'T HE? WELL DON'T EXPECT HIM BACK RIGHT AWAY, THOSE TWO HAVE BIG FISHES TO FRY, AND IN NO SMALL POND EITHER.”

She tries to look at Isabelle, a bit desperate, but the pale woman only shakes her head slightly, eyes cast. When she leaves the office, she is still stroking at her hand.

***

 

The five weeks Cooper spends away for his strange mission with Earle are among the longest of her life. They stretch and stretch like a landscape with no horizon, a building without windows, and she is forced to listen to the same records all day to measure and slice her time into neat segments, just to prove herself she is not stuck in a loop.

Every time she walks to Gordon's office to talk to Isabelle and try to understand, she isn't there. Medical leave, Gordon tells her with his usual, lying face.

She gets paperwork from the labs, Albert's way to be thoughtful and preserve her from boredom, but the forms accumulate without her being able to care. The world is strangely silent, and threateningly so. The voices no longer invite themselves in her head. And Cooper doesn't send a single tape.

Until one day a small, miraculous package appears on her desk. She tears the envelops off, barely manages to place it correctly in her walkman, and presses “on” without taking her breath.

There is frying on this one. At first, she hears nothing. And then. And then,

 

“Diane.”

 

She rips the earpieces away and almost throws the walkman against the wall. Standing next to her tumbled down chair, all she can do is watch with horror the small reels as they turned inside the transparent device, carrying a voice that isn't Cooper at all. It's Earle.

*

“No, no, let me speak to her, it will only take a minute. Don't look so blue, Dale, I won the game so I get the recorder, this is only fair. I'll let her know how much fun we have here, how does that sound? Show her we are doing alright.”

The background of this tape is full to the brim with disapprobation, but that's a meager consolation.

“So, Diane, where were we? A little something to keep you occupied. I gather dear Dale here is in the habit of singing you lullabies and telling you all his secrets when he travels, so I've got a riddle for you, it only seems appropriate. Here it comes, listen carefully: “Why is the fireman's wife happy?” This is a hard one, Dale couldn't guess it, but I'm confident you will. Eventually. Or you could ask Gordon, he heard it before. Anyway, I'll let you think about it. We're learning a lot, the two of us: it is a fascinating case. Dale is so observant, I couldn't ask for a better partner, but I know you understand me. Sweet dreams, Diane, he sends his love, I'm sure: he's been awfully quiet since I recorded this.”

She thinks she might be sick. It took her almost an hour to listen to the whole tape, short as it is, and it still feels like a violation. Factually, there is nothing special to this message, but the tone, the tone is so wrong she almost wants to go deaf again. And the worst part is, she is convinced Earle intended her to report this to Gordon. It is too obvious a bait: a record, a proof of sort, even if there is nothing in the words she can decipher, but Gordon will. Whatever way he's trying to influence their boss, she will not be the messenger. She will, however, archive this as secretly as she can, sellotaping it at the bottom of their old biscuit box, and pray for Isabelle to come back as soon as possible. Because when she does, she is going to ask her about her husband.

 

***

Isabelle does not come back, at least in the following weeks. Sounds, however, do. It is as if Earle stealing Cooper's voice has triggered some acoustic phenomenon, and now she has to live surrounded by the noises of invisible waves crashing in the distance, and an old gramophone, playing repetitive tunes.

** 

One day, as she is desperately trying to focus on rescheduling all Cooper's missed training sessions, the sound of footsteps mixes with the waves in the background.

She doesn't trust her hearing anymore, refuses to be disappointed, so she stays stuck at her desk and closes her eyes, hands flat on her calendar, to let the ghosts know she's not playing that game. The steps come closer. She wonders if she tried to open the useless window before she got to scheduling, because the air in the room is moving too, slowly. Closer. It's behind her now. She tries not to breathe, and mentally looks for any trace of static, searches for the waves, thermal and sonic, that could be messing with her mind. She thinks she hears breathing. Normal breathing, slightly labored perhaps, hesitating. She sits very still, and there's a breath on her neck now, she's almost sure. A pause. She shuts her eyes even tighter. And then the air moves again and two hands, warm, lend on her shoulders, thumbs lightly stroking her collar. She smiles to the darkness.

“You're back,” she whispers, voice laced with pure joy.

“I am,” Cooper's voice says against her hair, breath hot. “As much as I would like to pretend I'm just a product of your imagination, because it certainly looked as if you were trying to conjure me up by the power of your mind.” He possibly utters the following word in the same rhythm but she hears it separately, “Diane.”

“I wasn't sure it was you,” she answers, relief spreading in her chest like a blooming flower. She's so reassured she suddenly wants to play around, all concern gone. “We get all sorts here these days.”

“Did Desmond tried to stop by again to get me on his jazz nights?” The hands begin to glide along her arms, back and forth, slowly, as her nose picks up his scent, and she gets her final confirmation that she is not inventing him.

“Oh yes. Also Gordon lost his way the other day, and came in convinced it was Doug's office and I was...what's her name, Janice. It took him five minutes to figure it out, quite spectacular. He stood there, mute, you could see in his eyes he knew me, who I was, and yet I swear several times he was on the verge of saying “You've changed a lot” or something of the sort. Imagine that. I just ended up yelling at him he got the wrong door and of course he stayed and talked about Indian food for forever.”

Cooper chuckles against her cheek.

“Would you consider opening your eyes now? As much as I admire your ability to trace that line straight along your lids, I've brought something back that I need you to see.”

“Is it peaches?”

It's not peaches.

It's butterflies. In two, three display cases: reds, greens, blues and yellows, blacks and whites, like so many versions of creatures she has never seen flying, ever, not in the uncertain drafts of Philadelphia's parks, sumptuous and frozen, exquisitely pinned in the heart. Dead. She feels herself pale.

“So he finally took you to Denver,” she manages to say, in a blank voice, eyes fixed on the reddish flecks scattered on a cream, paper-thin wing that looks like real paper now, a two-dimensional representation of the being it once was, straight out from a book, a man-made copy of a specie with a godly name, _Parnassus Apollo_ , a small carton under the specimen informs her.

“Aren't they fascinating? Windom taught me how to embalm them. This turned out to be a great contribution to my ongoing reflection on the fragile boundaries separating life from death, and the myriad of possibilities emerging in between those two poles.”

The crucified butterflies are staring at her from behind their window-pan, probably headed for a spot on Cooper's wall, a thought that makes her whole skin sting like from a thousand needles.

“I don't really like seeing them trapped like that. Exposed.”

Even though she kept the irrational uneasiness at bay, he tilts his head and smiles at her, with his good, genuine face, and she wants to crawl into a hole and hide there forever.

“Yes but then how are you supposed to get to know them? Most of our knowledge on living forms derives from such practices. It's hard to understand a butterfly when it's flying away.”

Arguing with Cooper has always been one of her favorite sports, but he is right, and she cannot find a single good reason to account for her need to put the cases away in a secret, dark drawer as if they were plans for large scale annihilation.

“That tape Earle sent…,” she tries instead, because it suddenly seems very relevant to their conversation, but he blinks and looks away, like someone who's embarrassed by a slip of the tongue.

“Would you be so kind as to forgive us, Diane, that wasn't very professional, not, not in the best of taste. Windom can have a peculiar sense of humor, but I assure you he only meant well.”

 

In the end she carefully maneuvers him into hanging the butterflies in a spot she cannot see from her desk, and shakes away the sudden, irrepressible need to dye her hair.

***

 

Every subsequent attempt she makes at explaining her unease to Cooper is a distinct failure, and she can see why. Earle's always been acting good-naturally around Cooper, which puts his actions in a very different perspective for him, and he seems convinced that she is only disturbed by his slightly odd friend harmless quirks. To add to her misery, she has nothing tangible against him, no real evidence, no clear threat or wrongdoing, nothing but a slight nausea and a need to crawl out of her skin. No one in his good sense, she thinks, will believe her. So she calls Albert.

“You've reached the fifth circle of federal Hell, congratulations: you can now hang off.”

“Can we go to your place after work?”

She can almost hear the retort, the _risqué_ joke he would be making if she wasn't sounding so anxious.

“A bit forward but I guess after last month party I owe you a temporary shelter.”

**

Albert's apartment is full of hidden nooks, so ill-conceived and contorted you never quite learn your way around it, not to mention it is a nightmare to store anything in a place where you can't even find a patch of wall regular enough to hold a shelf. And Albert just owns so many jazz records.

Miraculously, the rooms are extremely tidy, and she suspects it's always the case, even if he made her wait a good ten minutes in front of the door before allowing her in – he probably can't stand the idea of someone seeing proof of him living like a regular human being, with dirty plates in his sink. And it's a lot, she realizes, being admitted there. She wonders how many people from work ever got that privilege. After one or two stray dogs and homeless punk allusions, Albert quickly looses his nerves and asks her directly what the matter is.

So she tries to translate, as methodically as possible, the collection of moments that put her ill-at-ease, left her cold and worried, and sometimes downright furious. All she has is a mess of emotions and theories, but it makes sense enough for her.

“Something is wrong with Earle,” she concludes.

And she is very surprised to hear him answer:

“I know.”

When he catches the startled look on her face, he elaborates:

“You may not have heard me say it often, but the fact is I happen to like Caroline. I've met her very early in my days in the Bureau, and she is a good one, not that there are too many of them here. But the last couple of years, she seemed...off. So it worried me when she suddenly became best pal with Cooper after the gloomy talk about death they had at that awful party. I was around, trying to avoid that waste of space Sam Stanley, and I heard. She was saying that killing had changed her husband.”

He takes a sip of his scotch while she processes the information.

“After that, I began noticing things. Little things, really. Just like the ones you mention, but I must have worked in the morgue for too long, I'm not one to ignore symptoms. So I went and told Gordon. He acted like it was innocuous, although he seemed satisfied enough that I came to see him. So he knows, if that can reassure you – I'm sure it doesn't do anything for me. What he intends to do with that information, I have no fucking idea. Earle gets all the most classified stuff, after all, missions I only know of because of the autopsies, and sometimes, they don't even let me do them. I don't like it one bit.”

“You paid more attention than I gave you credit for.”

“It's almost as if I were a real agent, and not some decorative lamppost in a lab coat.”

“But everyone else seemed too...distracted. They've been dealing with some weird stuff lately...I heard.”

She carefully avoid saying that includes her, and does not mention the fireman's wife either. Isabelle's face is still vivid in her mind, forbidding her to share this secret with anyone else, at least for now. Because a suspicion has begun forming, and now she can't let go of it so easily: there was an accusation in that riddle.

“Yeah, well... Gordon keeps using convoluted metaphors with me, trying to sell me some New Age philosophy, but I'm not really one for pretending stuff are incommensurable and out of our reach and what have you. It's always a trick we use to cover our tracks and hide the fact that we behave, most of the time, like complete bastards. People are often awful, and there's no yin and yang bullshit that can make me forget that. You cannot tolerate everything out of mystical curiosity.”

Sometimes it's hard, looking at Albert, really looking at him, because she is not sure she will be able to keep the awe and the fondness at bay, and he is so easily frightened. Usually she lets him blissfully ignore that she likes him, loves him now, the FBI a violent catalyst for such relationships, because they're essentially the same and she knew it from the start, from the very moment he laid eyes on her and started to raise an unwilling eyebrow. They sharpened their emotions into blades because they had no clue how to use them, and cut their way through everything and everyone, although she seems more prone to spill it around like a thunderstorm, and that could still be her inner Greek crying side speaking, who the fuck can tell.

“Here's what I know: Earle's evaluation is coming in a few months. If Gordon plans to make a move, and I think he might, it will be there. If he's trying to outrank him, or simply being a nuisance for the fun of it – which is a real possibility –, the cunning weirdo will frame him, be sure of it. I've seen it before. In the meantime, I can try, but only to do you a favor, to snatch his annoying secretary away from him. We've been underwater in the labs lately: truth is we really could use a new employee. But I cannot divorce him for Caroline.”

There was less phone calls in the past few months, and she never asked Cooper why. Not that it matters so much, for what can you say to the wife of a man who wins at chess, tells riddles and collects butterflies? There would be something else to say, to say right now, help to offer, but she is too distracted, carried away from the complicated apartment by Albert's choice of words, _he will frame him, I've seen it before_.

 

When she manages to refocus, he is looking at her strangely under the yellow glow of the various desk lamps that give a surprisingly warm atmosphere to the room.

“Maybe I worry too much,” she tries without conviction.

“Maybe,” he sighs, getting up to put on a different record. “But you worry, and that is enough for me. Although,” he smirks from above his shoulder, “I always took you to be a rather poor judge of character.”

She lets out a low chuckle in her glass, a bit vexed nonetheless.

“You have some fucking nerve, Rosenfield.”

“All I'm saying is you don't necessary keep around the most commendable people, present company included.”

She absolutely regrets his no-smoking rule, because that would have been the perfect moment to blow a cloud in his face.

“Does that bold opinion also include Cooper?”

Now who looks a bit sheepish.

“Don't be ridiculous, we all need something to look at while we are filing the paperwork.”

Ah. There they went. She should have known.

“Do we?”

He mumbles something that must be “yeah, that's what I said”, looking everywhere but at her, and if she didn't know him as well as she does – but she doesn't really, isn't that the whole point of this exchange? – she would have sworn his ears were turning red. It's hard to have patience for subjects that shouldn't be difficult ones, but she owes him this.

“Look,” she says smoothly, crossing her legs in her seat, “you've seen the mess I made of that HR party because Rebecca thought I was hitting on her. You saw me ogle Isabelle, although the term may not be right. I'm not...” She pauses, takes a breath, tries again. “I'm not a vessel of traditional crap, Albert. You can tell me these things. I date women too.”

“And I don't. There's not much point in talking about it. But that doesn't mean you get to decide if I should, for example, take the risk of dancing with an employee, at work. In front of all the staff. It's the FBI, Diane. I can't have...that. Or anything.”

Jeffries and Gordon, the girls washing the dishes in the cafeteria whom everyone swears are _best friends_ , lab tech hidden behind dark glasses. There are many invisible things in the office, not all of them metaphysical, and Albert is right: sometimes there is no excuse.

She nods, because she cannot manage to say she's sorry although she should be, and there is no need to explain to Albert, of all people, that sometimes she gets too angry and too drunk. Instead, she offers to cook them something “with whatever boring vegetables you must have in store”, an offer he recognizes as the threat it really is – she cannot cook for her life and this has become a well-known office fact since she accidentally caused the explosion of one brand-new microwave. Once they're sitting in front of the puttanesca he made them after forbidding her to approach his kitchen, she purposefully points her fork at him:

“You can have something. Someone. You can, you should, and you will. Wine please?”

There is a good chance he doesn't believe her, but he smiles nonetheless as he refills her glass, shaking his head.

“So,” she tries sneakily before dessert, because so much restrain cannot be good for her health, “Cooper, huh?”

“Oh shut it. You're the one who fixes his ties.”

***

 

It takes some cigarettes to bribe the guys from the tech department, but she knows they're frustrated to only use such good cameras to photograph corpses and ruined motel rooms. The flash makes her jump as it reverberates on the dark walls of the basement they work in, and while she waits in the red light of the development room, she can't help but notice that, today, most of the photos waiting to be collected are shots of dead women, empty eyes looking away from her and from the lines of a face that, after being plunged into some unknown liquid, begins to appear, slowly, to come into existence as it gets drowned, more and more, in the tray.

The picture remains a bit blurred on the edges, which strangely reassures her, since she feels she already doesn't look like the woman on it, smiling enigmatically to someone invisible, her hair so vividly green and her eyes so blue the colors must have been a bit saturated. This woman can be Future Diane, the person Cooper addresses when he whispers to his recorder, although this expression, this smile now belongs to her past. She can be anything he wants, which is really why she shouldn't walk back so confidently in their office, gliding the image in his wallet behind his back, all the while aware he has seen her do it.

“For when you're too far gone,” she says. “Happy birthday, Coop.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Actual summary of this chapter be like: Albert Rosenfield is a stellar ally. And in my opinion perfectly right to challenge Diane on her stance with Clark in the previous chapter, which you've all forgotten everything about because it's like 6 months old, but hey.  
> Also: plot. Kind of, you'll see (I hope).  
> Well, now that this is done, I wonder. I mean I absolutely wish I could post something new for Christmas but we all know that's not going to happen. I'll try to use my Christmas break to catch up on this story, but I can't make any precise promise on the update schedule. I'll do my best (and you all saw how yelling at me helped, so if you get frustrated there's always my tumblr, https://dye-ann.tumblr.com/).


End file.
